


For Those Who Mourn

by twistedingenue



Series: The B-Team [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor - Fandom
Genre: Action/Adventure, Asgard, Bechdel Test Pass, F/M, Gen, Manipulative Loki, Politics, Women Being Awesome, the series where everyone you love is dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-13 03:11:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1210495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedingenue/pseuds/twistedingenue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to The B-Team</p><p>“It just can’t be….” Jane walks into the center of the circle, holds out her hand until the familiar weight of Mjolnir has joined to her. “Thor said, no, he yelled,” and if she just does the same, nothing will happen, right? They can all laugh and continue on their day.</p><p>It’s late afternoon, and the clouds aren’t even heavy, but it’s like she can feel a storm coming in the thudding of her heart, as she stands her ground, plants her feet into the intricate patterns, and raises her voice loud enough for the desert to hear. “Heimdall, open the Bifrost!”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Or, Jane's Excellent Asgardian Adventure. 
> 
> Big thanks to my betas boofadil and weoffendedshadows. And for puffabilly, who is the best damn person ever for putting up with this fic, one scene at a time, and for making the lovely cover art.
> 
> My playlist for this work is available at [ 8tracks](http://8tracks.com/twistedingenue/for-those-who-mourn)

“No, I refuse to believe that,” Jane laughs as she digs at the ground with her shoe and Bucky leans in to listen. “I refuse to believe that we are exactly here.”

"What don't you believe?" Darcy calls out from where Clint's set up a range and is allegedly trying to teach her how to arch. Based on the amount of times she's actually nocked an arrow, lessons are proceeding slowly, and it's likely a miracle they both have clothes on.

It's been a long week, though, so the night off is a godsend. Jane had wanted a break from either New York or Malibu, from constantly being recognized even outside of being a "medieval barbie" as one mean spirited columnist put it. A poor example for children, Jane's ass, she's got a doctorate, a good heart and more power in her swing than her muscles should be able to produce. She's a damn good example for the kids of the world.

Work hard, kids, and someday you too can meet a god, watch him die, take his glory, and prove worthy of great power.

They'd come out to New Mexico, doing some good old fashioned research, just like she used to. Darcy came with, needing the break even more than Jane. Darcy's been running on fumes since the Chitauri attack, and her recovery has been slower than anyone would like, and the week off seems to be doing her good. Clint came with, and curiously, so had Bucky.

"It's all still here, look." Jane clears off the dust and loose dirt that covers the intricately patterned ground. "We managed to set up camp right where Thor landed that first night."

Do me a favor and don’t be dead.

But of course, death comes to everyone. Jane doesn’t resent that, the ubiquity of death is comfortable, it’s the specific deaths that are taxing, that change you.

Take Darcy, for example. Thor’s death changed her trajectory, but not her heart.  It hadn’t been until Coulson’s death that she started to die with him too. Jane watches her with Clint now, and still, it doesn’t seem like much has changed. Coulson’s death put grave responsibilities on her shoulders. Saving the world from an alien invasion didn’t change that, having people care about her doesn’t change that. But it seems like every month, the weight bears down on her more.

“Really, we did?” Darcy turns around, walks over and stands at the edge of the imprint. “I tased him, right there you know.”

“You hit the god of lightning with a taser?” Bucky says, still close at Jane’s side.

“It’s still something she’s proud of.” Jane walks around the circle, the ghosts of the past  almost visible there on the ground. “Selvig held on to having to lift him into the van for months. Said it killed his back.”

“Thor was heavy,” Darcy says with amusement. “I just, remember, he was going on and on about Odin and Heimdall and the bifrost. He yelled for it to be….” She trails off, “Jane…he said that like he expected the sky to swallow him whole.”

Jane draws herself up, tall and questioning. “It can’t be that easy.”

“What can’t be that easy?” Clint says, bow in one hand and taking another point in the circle. They are all standing around it now.

It just can’t be that simple, it can’t be just asking, can it? All the study, all that research that she’s barely had time to do and the answer was in her voice?

“It just can’t be….” Jane walks into the center of the circle, holds out her hand until the familiar weight of Mjolnir has joined to her. “Thor said, no, he yelled,” and if she just does the same, nothing will happen, right? They can all laugh and continue on their day.

It’s late afternoon, and the clouds aren’t even heavy, but it’s like she can feel a storm coming in the thudding of her heart, as she stands her ground, plants her feet into the intricate patterns, and raises her voice loud enough for the desert to hear. “Heimdall, open the Bifrost!”

It’s several long moments that they stand there, heads raised up and shielding their eyes from the sun, and there’s nothing. Jane starts to turn to Darcy, to shrug and say that it was worth a shot, when the sky opens up. The last thing she sees before she starts moving is Clint hurriedly typing on his phone and the world is washed in color.

“Shit, I dropped my phone,” Clint says shortly after Jane finally catches her breath.

“Did you manage to hit send?” Darcy asks, her eyes closed.

“Let’s hope Nat got it.”

“Darce, open your eyes.” Jane grabs her arm. “Open your eyes and look around.” Everything is bright and golden, massive in size and scope. The walls are patterned with overlapping, ornate circles that don’t just seem to be there to impress and cow over visitors, but are filled with information that they just don’t comprehend yet. The center of the room is overshadowed with an imposing statue in golden armor, standing over a platform with a sword nearly as tall as he is.

“Where the hell are we?” Bucky closes the gap between then, taking a reflexive protective step just in front of her. It’s instinct, even though she’s more than capable of handling herself. Possibly more so than anyone else in the room with her.

She doesn’t know how far the change in her has gone. Thor was tough even when powerless. And his friends, well, his friends fought long and hard before they had fallen as well, well beyond any human had any right to do. She heals fast, she doesn’t ache after a fight, and barely feels the sting of a well placed punch, even from War Machine. And still, Bucky tries to put himself in front of her in an unfamiliar place.

“You have passed into the realm of Asgard, Midgardians,” a deep voice says, and Jane looks around to try to place it and finds that there is no statue in the center of the room, but a man. God. Asgardian. Whatever. He does not make any attempt to move from his spot, but opens his eyes and levels his gaze as Jane. “I have been watching you Jane Foster, and I am heartened that you finally have paid call to our realm. I am Heimdall.”

“You’ve been watching me,” Jane steps forward, walking towards the impassive man. “How have you been watching me?”

He has a curious ghost of a smile on his lips. “I can see every droplet of rain as it falls upon your world, and follow it to the oceans. It is no difficult task to find a woman who is worthy of the great power that Thor once possessed.”

She stops short, finally coming to see the totality of Heimdall, and where he should have legs, clad perhaps in bright greaves and solid boots, he is instead encased in gold and sunk into the floor to his knees. His only freedom of movement comes from above the waist and he leans on his sword. The tip is dull, useless in a real fight.

“If you were watching her, why didn’t you open the Bifrost before? We could have really used some help a few months ago,” Darcy asks,  joining Jane on her right as Clint flanks around to the other side of Heimdall. She takes a sharp shallow breath when she sees what shackles Heimdall wears.

“By order of the regent, Loki Odinson, I am not given leave to open our gates unless specifically requested, such as by your bellow Lady Foster.”

There's a clattering in the hall outside, the unmistakable sign of soldiers running, but instead of coming straight in, they stop and fan to the entrances. Three on each side, with dark capes and serviceable armor.

Jane might have spent some time studying armor recently. Occupational hazard, when something new happens, she has to break it down into its component parts and master them all. Her magically appearing armor and it's care is similar enough to RESCUE and War Machine that she didn't have to start from scratch, but the new avenue of research was exhaustive anyways. These men -- and all of them are men, there are no shield-maidens, no women like Sif among them --  wear armor that bears little customization or detail. In this space, they look more out of place than Darcy’s brightly colored hat.

And then, Frigga sweeps into the room. Thor had never described her physically, but there's no doubt that this is a woman who has known what it is to rule and what it is to lose. Her dress is long, and seems a plain, lifeless grey against the splendor of just this one room. Her golden hair, and everything around here shines with light, everything is gold and heavy, is plaited simply and wound around her head. She is a diminished force, but still a mighty one.

“I have felt the flax and thread upon the loom, a force that I have longed for in my Hall,” she says, and her eyes fall upon Mjolnir and rake over Jane. She tries not to shrink under her disappointed gaze. “You are the one found worthy?”

“I am.” Jane pushes down her shoulders and wills the armor onto her body. The scales always tickle as they unfold, and the chest plate catches her breath, which she huffs out with the added weight of the cape. “Jane Foster, my lady.” She’s not certain what to do. The inner drama queen tells her to go to her knees, but she’s long kicked that part of her to the curb. She’s big enough already, and she bows to Frigga. Clint and Bucky follow suit, and Darcy manages to curtsey without a hint of mockery.

“The Lady Foster called out to me, my Queen.” Heimdall says. “It is my duty to respond to the honorable and those who rightfully seek to travel among the realms”

“As it should be, Heimdall.” She murmurs with a smile and with pity as she turns her attention to the dark man. She does not look with kindness at his imprisonment, but she also makes no move to free him.  She turns and  the back of her gown shimmers in a billow of loose fabric, pinned at the shoulder. “Come then, a noble party such as yours will be introduced to my son.”

Clint’s sharp intake of breath is audible, and while Frigga does not stop, she tilts her head slightly towards the noise. Darcy quickly covers as they begin to follow, sighing, “ I knew I should have redone my nails this morning.”

  
  


* * *

He can’t wipe the blue from his vision, and his neck is sweating. Clint should be casing and watching, finding escape routes, but every step he takes disappears into black behind him.  There’s nothing but the hall ahead of him, nothing but the creeping tinge to his sight. They are going to see Loki, and this Loki has done nothing to him, has not made him betray everything he is and has worked hard to wipe clean.

This Loki is still capable of all those things.

There is a weight on his back, Darcy’s hand, warm and steady, slowing him down and widening the hall to more than just the space ahead of him.

“You can’t,” He says, stuttering and tripping over his tongue, “You can’t trust anything he says. He will lie as soon as he breathes.”

“You’ve said.” Darcy’s hand squeezes his waist for a second. “We’ve listened. Nothing here seems right, anyways.”

She doesn’t exactly chase the threat from his eyes, but her steady voice does what she wants it to do. He can be ready to just act, and can trust that Darcy, in a crisis and a fight, is taking stock of the rest. It’s the greatest thing she learned from Coulson in this world.

Frigga brings them to a stop outside a set of magnificent and heavy doors. “You will wait here but for a moment.” She’s pleasant and damn regal, and when she looks back before slipping through the door, she takes a final assessing scrutiny of Jane in her armor. If she comes to any conclusions, it doesn’t play out on her face.

Jane released a breath. “It’s not like I took his name.”

“No, you just have his image, his power, and probably the dearest object of his,” Bucky says. “You are the embodiment of the son she lost, Jane.”

“How can I live up to that?” she asks, looking at Bucky side-eyed. Barnes doesn’t usually do profound, but he’s not a slouch, just an old man in a young body. Maybe he knows something about this variety of expectations.

“You don’t.” He shuts his mouth quickly and his head snaps up to attention as the great doors swing open without warning.

The guards horseshoe around them and they all move forward into a throne room. Every inch is patterned with carved ribbon knotwork, animals that flow with grace on the walls and ceiling. More soldiers line either side of the aisle, with ornate and antler like helms. Clearly, Loki’s been saving the best of his men to guard him, not his mother.

They are stopped before a series of steps leading to a dais and the throne upon it is built like a sword, jutting up to the ceiling, the hilt decorated with the same knotwork. It flows into animals, and hammers and what looks, to Clint, like wings

Loki, regent and ruler of all Asgard, stands there.  Clint swallows down his hatred and the rising twist to his gut. “I bid you welcome to Asgard, Jane Foster, and to your company. I open my hall to you and may all your needs be met.”

Charming bastard, lying as smooth as the day he was born. Clint stops listening to what he is saying, looks at the liar.  There’s less contrast to his coloring, and while he is still pale and dark haired, he’s not like a living ghost. His eyes don’t burn in frenzy.

He’d look better dead.

“Thank you,” Jane falters slightly, not knowing what to say next. “I look forward to seeing more of this realm. From what little I heard, Asgard must be filled with wonders.”

Darcy stifles a laugh, Jane doesn’t quite have the cadence down, uses words as filler. Apparently, eloquence is not one of the hammer’s gifts.. She leans over. “She’s hiding an internal monologue of ‘when can I science?’ really well.”

Loki’s attention snaps to Clint and then to Darcy, taking the two of them in. Clint shifts his weight to be light on his feet, run if needed. He’s not going to outwit Loki, but he can work with what he’s got here. Even without that staff, Loki is dangerous. There must be something in all this gold that he can use when this all goes to shit. A slow smile slides across half of Loki’s mouth.

“There are certainly many things to examine here Lady Foster. I am only well acquainted with yourself, though. Please, introduce me to your party.”

Jane’s eyes dart to Darcy’s, who does some sort of dance with her eyebrows and lips to communicate. “Of course,” she says, “Darcy Lewis, my assistant and our friends, Clint Barton and James Barnes.”

“Soldiers?” Loki prompts, with an empty smile, “Guards? You have need of these people even with the power you now possess?”

“They are —“

“Family. Thor had Sif and the Warriors Three,” Darcy interrupts, matching Loki’s smile with her own false cheer, and fixes her gaze upon him. “Friends who fight alongside each other become a type of family, do they not?”

It’s too early to start testing and challenging Loki. They should just get out of here, go home. Asgard shouldn’t concern them. And Clint knows he’s internally panicking when he’s contemplating isolationism. What happens on Asgard will someday come to them, and what happens on Earth. Well, Asgard’s been meddling on Earth for centuries, haven’t they? Loki will eventually do the same.

“Loki,” Frigga says, and Loki breaks off eye contact with Darcy and softens at his mother’s voice, “We should give them the chance to be more comfortable if they are to stay for a few days. I have arranged for rooms.” She smiles warmly, almost to fullness.

“Of course, my honored mother is much more attuned to the needs of guests,” Loki says, “I shall not keep you from enjoying the pleasures of my home.”  He tilts his head towards Jane and swoops out of the hall, guards taking up position alongside him.

 

* * *

 

It's not at all what Darcy needs. When it was just a little science vacation, Darcy was pretty content, her head’s been a little full lately and she jumped at the chance to do something a little bit different. She knows she gets a little single-minded, and even with the combined forces of wrong scrambling to recover from the Chitauri attack and not trying to track down and kill the remnants of SHIELD, she has a hard time pulling away from it.

Scaling back her job to coffee making and highlighting for a week seemed like a great idea. But now that she's been shown to some really opulent guest hall and a chest full of Asgard appropriate clothing, she's itching to track down some AIM or Hydra operatives instead and render them at the least incapacitated. Diplomacy is not her style of intrigue anymore.

Really, intrigue is not her style of intrigue either. She’s better with a gun these days.

She fingers some of the clothing in the chest, carved out of some dark wood into a flower motif. It's soft and strong, with what seems like miles of fabric in the folds that might require assistance from someone who actually knows how it is supposed to go on her body. Darcy’s still digging through the trunk when Clint comes in, wearing what looks like the Asgardian equivalent of his SHIELD uniform. Darcy wrinkles her nose at him, “Natural fibers, hotstuff, I’m not sure I can deal with something that doesn’t have petroleum as it’s base on you.”

“I wear cotton and denim all the time.” Clint balks, picking at the sleeve of his undertunic, cut close to his wrist. He sits down next to Darcy and pulls out one of the dresses. “Where’s the neck in this thing?”

“Beats me.” Darcy grins, standing with one of the long dresses, a floaty thing with beading throughout, and twirls it around, “This is ridiculous. Sif would not have worn this. There has to be —“ Clint hands up a pair of, oh bless, those are pants, in a dark grey and when she gets them on,  they are loose and fall at her ankles with pooled fabric. She pulls out dress after dress, each looking like they belong in that hall and not at all on her, until she finally finds a simple tunic in a subdued berry. There’s still flossed and gold embroidery in the same patterns that adorned the throne.

She shrugs off her shirt, pulling it over her head and Clint helps by bowling her over and straddling her hips. His fingers crawl over her stomach before grabbing the last bit of fabric from her face. Darcy’s grinning when she emerges, but Clint’s looking over her stomach and the narrow cut of the Asgardian tunic with concern.

“Is that going to fit?” He says, holding it just out of reach.

Darcy lifts herself up to try to reach the tunic, Clint’s hand flattening over her stomach. “Might be a bit tight around the girls, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“When did you get so thin?” He holds the tunic over his head, leaning down to kiss and distract Darcy, but Darcy isn’t so easily distracted. “No really, when did you get so thin, Darcy. Have you been eating?”

There’s a growl from low in her throat and it barks out, “Of course I have Clint, you’ve watched me eat most of my meals.”

“Are you training more?” Clint has big hands and long fingers, but he covers almost her entire stomach, flat and wrinkling with her muscles.

Darcy tenses and tries to sink into the floor, turning her face. “No,” she trails off and blows stuck hair off her lips. “Clint, come on, get off, I need to get dressed.” Clint takes her by the jaw, and she watches him while he looks her long and assessing.

“Okay,” he says, releasing her and rolling off. Darcy snatches the tunic from his hands and has to tug it over her breasts, the one area that it’s tight. She picks at the waist, marveling that yes, there is extra fabric.

She feels Clint’s hands on her shoulders, lips against the back of her head, and unspoken words hang between them. “Okay,” she says, “Maybe a little too much time in the gym. “ Her lip twitches up and her fingers itch like she’s dropping something.

Clint drums a syncopated roll on her skin, “He’s, not quite the same, you know. I should have expected that. He’s not quite as starved as when we got him, there’s not as much rage.”  A kiss to her shoulder, the skin warming under his tactile lips, “But something’s worse, I think. He’s aware, even if we’ve thrown him for a loop. It’s not the same single-minded focus he had during my first Chitauri invasion — it’s global and all-encompassing.”

Darcy honestly doesn’t give a shit about Loki, and only out of love for Jane does she have any for Asgard. Loki can rot as king upon the throne, it doesn’t matter if he deserves it. They are not the appointed keepers of all the nine realms. Earth is beyond their grasp. There is nothing on Asgard that helps her. But she’s here, and it is for Jane that has her putting on these clothes and watching and listening to Clint and not walking back to where Heimdall stands his enforced watch and demand passage back. She has a few places she’s love to drop in unannounced, even if she doesn’t have any weapons on her.

Actually, it’s not love of Jane that keeps her listening to Clint, it’s something else and she’s hesitant to name it. He’s working through a line of thought,  “Notice that he’s titled as the Regent?”

“You think he did something to Odin?” If you can answer a question with a question, it means you are listening.

“I know he must be doing something to Odin, and I don’t know what. If he wanted the throne, wouldn’t he just kill him?”

“Maybe it’s not that easy,” Darcy answers, and thinks back to the throne room, and the people who were there with him.  “There’s probably a reason he has to wait.” Loki doesn’t sit on the throne as if he is unsure of his place upon it, and he might be crazy as balls, but it’s the type of crazy that comes from moving so much in his head at one time.

Darcy has the uncomfortable feeling that she’s not getting back to Earth, not getting back to her work, until this gets sorted out here. Clint has steel in his voice, “well plans are made to be broken.”

 

* * *

 

Bucky throws on the first reasonable outfit he finds in the trunk in the room he's issued. He dipped deep into it when he was putting his boots back on, because they can make him change his clothes, but he's not about to give up his boots for either the soft slippers or unfamiliar pointy boots that were offered. James Barnes is not about to prance around like an elf in new shoes.

He tugs the sleeve of the tunic, a deep olive green that reminds him of the uniforms of days gone by, and pulls it to his wrist. He’s not ashamed of his arm, but it is a distraction, and being able to cover it is welcome for what he is going to do.

The wing containing their rooms is sparsely guarded, with most of the broad shouldered and golden armored men standing around Jane’s room.  He waits for Jane to run out of her room, in a glittering bronze gown and pound on Darcy’s door, and slips out of the hallway while the guards are distracted.  It’s years of practice of memorizing on the fly that allows him to find his way out and over the bridge.

It’s gaudy, but it is an entrancing gaudiness, the glint and sheen of the spectrum of colors in the bridge, looking like tinsel under glass that opens up to the spherical expanse that looks over the universe.

“You have returned swiftly back to this place,” Heimdal says, amber eyes near glowing, transfixed ahead of him. “I can see all things under Yggdrasil, but I only have my own judgement as to why men do what they do.”

“You know when we are sleeping, you know when we’re awake?” Bucky mutters under his breath. “Do you keep track of all the universe, or only what you are looking for.”

“You are asking if I have seen your sojourns, soldier, I was not watching for them.” Heimdall closes his eyes. “But I still have seen what has been done to you. I fear we have much in common, having been used ill and punished for possessing what skills we have.” He stretches out one arm and invites Bucky to look upon his restraints.

“Guessing this wasn’t of your own doing or a requirement of your position,” He positions himself so that he is directly in front of the other man, dark and still imposing, even if he can’t move. “How fares your regent, Loki?” Bucky isn’t going to dance around this anymore. Heimdal didn’t need to bring them here, even if Jane has a very loud voice. They were brought here for a reason above and beyond seeing just who can bear Mjolnir.

“Loki has found himself in a role that he has always coveted. Even when he was a small child he considered himself the more apt brother to be heir. It is a fortuitous series of events that has brought him to the throne.”

“But he is the rightful heir?” he asks for clarity, “Not a usurper or coup?”

Heimdal speaks with a terrible calm but his jaw is set tightly, and Bucky would bet that under the armor that every muscle is tense with a need to break through his captivity. “He is the rightful heir. But Odin still lives, despite a troubled sleep.”

“If Loki is the heir, with Thor dead, then what’s the problem? Why trap you like this?”

“Odin should have awoken months ago, his sleep is troubled, and in my work I saw Loki deceive and manipulate and send a great weapon against Thor. Loki may be the next in line, but it is not of a natural succession.” Heimdal lifts his sword and watches the light gleam off the blade. “I did not take it well when I saw that the Destroyer took my own sisters life and refused to use my sight for Loki.”

“And now?” Bucky does not believe that this man stands here with his eyes closed the whole day. “Who do you watch for?”

“The same that my good sister Sif fought for, the good of Asgard.”

There’s something inborn that Bucky recognizes, the fight of the good versus of the bullies and liars of the world. He’s watched it all of the life he wants to recall, and always felt a little outside of it. Steve was so good and right, and he was always a little more willing to be dirty in his fight. Heimdall, he reminds Bucky of Steve, the old Steve. Before he got strong. Heimdall may be strong, but he is also limited and still rearing up for a fight.

Steve wasn’t often wrong about things. When someone was rotten, Steve knew, even when it wasn’t readily apparent to everyone else. For the good of Asgard, for the want of a good man limited by his circumstance, Bucky’s going to fight and get dirty about it.

He can’t say it out loud, but he’s not leaving until he sees the shackles gone, even if it means staying to live in the walls like a mouse.


	2. Chapter 2

All Jane wants to do collapse into the insanely comfortable looking bed in the rooms, no, the suite she was given, but it’s hours until she’s no longer the guest of honor at feast. Every time she gets caught up in something that just seems out of the realm of possibility and she really must  investigate, she gets redirected. There’s another morsel to test, another toast in her honor, another call to try her strength. The whole night is a series of ‘anothers’, and broken mugs, and while she sees Clint and Darcy throw in the towel and sneak out in good cheer, she’s had her shadow watching her.  
  
It’s well into the night when she finally is able to escape, stating that she’s more used to pleasures of Midgard than Asgard, and that sleep is perhaps the greatest of all of those in the mortal realm. And holy shit, where did she learn to talk like that. She could spend a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company and not be able to smooth out her words into grandiosity  like she can after less than a day in a mead hall.  
  
James, her ever-present shadow, seems to drop beside her. “We need to talk,” he tells her and together they walk back to her suite. Jane watches as he scopes out the front room, the cursory sweep he always does whenever he enters somewhere new, counting all the places where people can hide or be cornered. She does it too, whenever Darcy isn’t around to do it for her.  He doesn’t settle anywhere in the room,  but stands next to her.  
  
“This place isn’t right.” He says after his eyes dart around again, looking and finding nothing. “And I don’t mean that it’s cold or that it’s unnerving, although both of those are true.”  
  
“Everyone is so tall,” Jane’s spent the entire evening feeling like someone’s tricked up pony, or a sideshow, celebrated but only out of amusement, “I get unnerved just by walking around.” He grabs her by the shoulder, not with any malice, but it’s unexpected. Neither of them are touchy people, and she twitches.  
  
“It’s not that, it’s...” James coughs and looks down, releasing her, “What did Thor say of his father?”  
  
Jane tries to think back, but those three days still seem so blurry to her -- her first moments of really coming alive in the world, rather than just the pieces she studied. But she tries to recall Thor’s voice, “Bits. Good king, but not not an easy father.” She raises her eyes to his, “Loki deceived him, said that Odin had died, when that wasn’t true. But perhaps that was to ease him, since he could not return.”  
  
She wouldn’t trust Loki if she met him on the street, but there’s always a reason behind deception, even if it’s distasteful.  
  
“Heimdall thinks Odin should have woken up by now.” He lays out what he knows of the Odinsleep, of Heimdall, the Destroyer, everything. Jane takes it all in, listening with her eyes closed and trying to be impassive. The enormity of where she is, the veneer of the unreal overlaying what she needs to know about the universe works threatens to overtake her own rationality and it does her no good to leap headfirst.  
  
When he is finished, Jane presses down her need for immediate action, the drive to storm into wherever Odin is kept as he sleeps and look him over. She clamps down on her lips and forces herself to ask, “Is this our fight?” It will be a fight. You don’t seek to disrupt the power structure of another realm without it being a fight.  
  
“No,” James admits, “But it isn’t right, and you are uniquely equipped to butt into their politics. Look, I know a little something about chains and choice, and anyone that welds a powerful man to their work like that? Is not going to be content with just this realm for long, and it’s going to come to us some day.”  
  
Jane looks over where she’s left Mjolnir,  what connects her here and the legacy she maintains. It’s easy to stand for something when it’s personal, her vendettas and revenge, isn’t it? Harder when she has too look outside of her own desires to see where justice must be made.  
  
“I’m in,” she resolves, “But we are a team, and I won’t keep anyone here if they don’t want to. We’ll ask Clint and Darcy tomorrow.”  
  
James nods and he starts to turn away, but stops and puts his artificial hand on her shoulder, “You okay, being here?”  
  
Jane raises an eyebrow, “Did you actually want to talk about our feelings?” James laughs, shaking his head, and Jane gets a notion of what he might have been when he was actually young. A serious kid, with a streak of stubborn hellraiser. If he hadn’t been that way, he might not be making this transition to owning himself nearly as well. “Go get some sleep James. I don’t think any of these people are early risers, we can talk in the morning.”

* * *

  
  
“She’ll be out in a sec,” Clint says, passing a cup of something that the maid? Servant? Please-be-getting-paid lady gave him over to Jane. She drowns the thing, and it was almost too hot for Clint to drink. “She’s having issues with their clothing options.”  
  
“That’s a complicated way of saying that there is nothing that fits my tits in the trunk,” Darcy walks out of the bedroom, shutting a magnificently decorated door behind her, “Or for that matter, my tits and the junk in my trunk.” She’s had to adjust one of the dresses, changing the neckline so that it dips low, a looser chemise underneath it. The dress fits tight around her stomach, even smaller than the one from the night before. He might have let it slide last night, but there’s something in the back of his head that’s starting to index the little changes in Darcy, trying to put together a pattern. "If it fits one part of my body, it doesn't fit the rest."  
  
“What’s the news, lefty?” He’ll just push it out of his head for now -- they won’t be here long and he can sort things out with her later. And Bucky is just fun to rile up, because once he hits a certain point, he forgets to be all serious and he can see the kid Steve ran around being the proto-Cap with.  
  
That’s not in the cards today. Today, he’s James and he wants to make things right. As he’s laying out his connections, his intel and Jane nods along with him, Clint remembers too much. Loki didn’t confide in him, he wasn’t made privy to his mental landscape but there are things he can put together. Loki will never be satisfied.  He’ll start with Asgard, but it will never end there, because once Loki has tasted what having absolute power over a person is like, he will want for nothing more.  
  
Clint has failed so many people. There’s a whole universe of people out there that he’s failed now and he doesn’t want to screw this universe over if he has any chance of being able to stop it. “I’m in,” he says, and it’s like a field of blue that’s been waiting for him evaporates.  
  
Darcy hangs back, pressing herself up against a wall, carefully blank and a little hollow. No one looks right  at her, but everyone is waiting for her to speak up. She rather abruptly looks away from all of them too, biting her lip in an anxious tic.  Clint watches her through his peripheral vision, as she chases down her line of thought, scenarios and outcomes manifesting on her face as muscles tense. She shakes her head, “Far be it from me to go against the crowd. Yes, fine, let’s go on a fucking quest to save the alien king.”  
  
“Loki did not seem enthused with letting us have much time here.” Jane looks critically at Darcy, “I think I may have an easy way to see Frigga without raising any sort of suspicion.  What did you do to that dress?”  
  
“It was either this or a potato sack,” Darcy retorts, tensing at the attention on her and then she relaxes, a slow and sneaky smile creeping up her lips, “Loki wouldn’t care about women wanting clothing, would he?”  
  
“And it might get him to dismiss both of us.”  
  
Clint shakes his head, “No, he won’t dismiss you Jane, he never will. But he might think your abilities outside the hammer are inconsequential. In the meantime, you two can assess Frigga and where she stands in all of this.” He huffs out, “And we all know where Heimdall stands.” Bucky bites down an unwanted, harsh laugh.  
  
“I want to see Odin,” Jane says firmly, “I don’t know what we are dealing with here, and I can’t analyze things when I don’t have evidence of it.”  
  
“What, you think if you poke him, he’ll wake up?” Darcy scoffs  testily and hits one hand against the fingers of the other, “Shake his feet a few times, throw some water on him?”  
  
“Well I won’t know until I can get a look!” Jane raises her voice, jerking her chin up towards Darcy.  
  
“When you get in to see Frigga, if she’s amiable, have her take you around. If she can’t or won’t, I’ll find another way,” Bucky tentatively places his left hand on Jane’s shoulder, and that still creeps Clint out just a little bit. The whole robot arm thing is cool, and a brilliant piece of work, but it’s Clint’s own personal brand of body horror.  
  
The touch does get Jane to set back in her heels to the point that even Darcy notices — there’s nothing untoward or even intimate in any way about the gesture, but James has not been a handsy guy. Darcy raises her eyebrows, “Sorry, okay, Jesus, I don’t know what’s up with me today.” It’s not sincere.  
  
Clint wonders if anyone else gets that at all, but Clint has spent years of his life with professional liars, and his girl is a quick study.  
  


* * *

  
  
Once there’s a plan, Darcy gets to work. Even if she has little desire to remain in Asgard she can’t just leave without everyone else. That is, if she even could leave without everyone else, if Heimdall could be coaxed into opening the road between worlds for just her alone. She doesn’t have her tools - she doesn’t have her computer or her guns- but she does have her wits, her will, and her bitter truths.  Darcy is Control and everyone’s calm.  
  
Jane pulls her by the arm, drags her along until she can keep up with Jane’s stubborn, insistent strides.  “Come on, we’ve got to get started”  
  
“We didn’t have to go right now,” Darcy says, pulling Jane up short, “We need to think this through more. We are missing something about all of this.”  
  
“No,” Darcy can feel the urgency running through Jane’s being. Jane grabs Darcy’s hands and her grip tightens, shaking with curiosity, “We need to get started, we need to know how it all fits together.”  
  
“Jane we should figure out —“ Jane pulls her again, and Darcy swallows away that they need to know why this is happening. With Loki, the how is magic. Or technology that looks like magic. It’s the ‘why’ he’s doing it that will cause the unraveling, but Jane isn’t ready to listen to her yet. Jane’s never ready to do something as quaint such as listening when she’s itching for discovery.  
“My ladies?” Two women, in near matching bronze dresses that drape to their ankles, and gauzy, shimmering veils over thick plaits. Frigga’s handmaidens. The taller of the two bows slightly to them, “Our Queen wishes your company.”  
  
“How wonderful!” Darcy smiles brightly, conjuring up memories from long ago to support herself,  “We were just hoping we could see her. I’m having just a terrible time with the clothing in this place.” Darcy lets the other women lead them, lets her voice chatter in the halls with words that mean very little. She counts doors and memorizes the layout as they walk. Such information almost always pays off in the end.  
  
Frigga’s personal rooms lie at the end of a short hallway, guarded by another of the maidens, except this one is dressed in intricate and gilded brigandine leather armor, a sword belted at her hip. “Who do you bring to our door, dear Gna?”  
  
“I bring the woman to whom Mjolnir yields, and her companion. Syn, open the door to us.” The shorter of their escort says.  
  
Gna opens the door. Frigga’s rooms are spacious, and the first utterly light area of Asgard that they have seen yet, the first place that Darcy would willingly spend time.  She doesn’t feel constrained by all the walls and heavy woods and cold gold. It feels restful.  
  
Around a dozen women, all ages, stop where they are, and Darcy can tell their gowns are not quite identical. They are similar, but they are made with each particular woman in mind. Frigga enters the room, and she is above all, genuine. She’s also terrifying, and that’s not a word to be used lightly. Frigga fills every inch of the hall and she does it with great deception, because she looks like a prettied up version of  anyone's mother. Seriously, curl her college roommates mother’s hair and stick a crown on her head, and it’s a mirror image.    
Darcy belatedly curtsies, following Jane’s lead. Jane’s also talking, the babble about clothing. Frigga looks Darcy over and raises her eyebrows.  
  
“Of course, we can have something more appropriate provided,” Frigga says graciously, “Fulla, come and take the Lady Darcy’s measure.”  
  
Fulla is easily the youngest of the women, and the only one with her hair loose, held only with a thin gold band. Darcy receives quite the raking over from her, and from nowhere a measuring tape is produced. Jane smiles at Darcy, grinning broadly with secondhand embarrassment. Darcy tries not to squirm too much.  
  
“We can have something done before you dress for dinner Lady Darcy,” Fulla is grace, but Darcy recognizes something that’s not total innocence in her.  
  
“Fulla, take the others with you. I wish to speak to our guests. Gna may stay at the threshold.”  
When the room empties, so does the cheer from the hall.  
  
“You have come to me under false pretenses,” Frigga raises a hand, “she may have needed something more accommodating, but that was as easily handled by the maid, and not myself. No, I think you come to find the heart of Asgard.”  
  
“I don’t know how to address you,” Darcy blurts out, then holds her hand to her lips. A fantastic time to forget how tact works, “You aren’t our queen, Lady Frigga seems too small, how does one address a woman who we previously thought was fictional?”  
  
Frigga stiffens, “How did you address my son?”  
  
We addressed him by hitting him with a van. Twice.  Darcy’s tact chose an excellent time to return. “We called him Thor.”  
  
“In this  Hall, among this company, Frigga then.” She relaxes, her eyes closing, “I did not expect that I would ever see any who could take up such a prize. I am pleased that Midgard has a champion once more. They would not find such another here.”  
  
“I’m not sure if I can be a champion for my entire planet,” Jane admits, “But I did help save it not long ago, with the help of my team.” Jane looks at Darcy again, and Darcy warms under that praise, “Has Asgard washed her hands of the rest of the realms, then?”  
  
“For now, yes. Perhaps when he returns from his sleep, Odin will once again look kindly upon your realm. I fear though, that my son Loki does not share this concern.”  
  
Frigga knows. She knows who her son is, as clearly as if she had borne him. She may not know exactly what has been done to Odin, but this is as much an admission that all is not well at ease within her mind as they are going to get.  
  
“Jane is a woman of science, Frigga, and while we lag behind Asgard in most things, Jane is rather special in her understanding. Thor valued her intellect greatly,” Darcy says, “Perhaps her fresh eyes may be able shed some light into this prolonged Odinsleep.” Jane does a double take at her words and her compliment. But Darcy stands firm and pleasant, imploring Frigga silently to trust them with this. To let them join the game that Frigga has clearly already begun to play.  
  
“I believe we can arrange for Jane to present herself to Odin without alarm.” The message is clear: they are involved now, but it has to be done carefully. Darcy is Control. She can lead everything onto a calm and clear path.

* * *

  
  
James, Bucky, whatever he’s able to call himself this week — stalks the vast hallways. It’s a good idea to learn everything he can about the layout of the palace for when the shit hits the fan. They are wide and bright, columns and archways and out of the corner of his eyes he keeps seeing someone familiar. An impossible, dead familiar person.  
  
He hangs back against one of the columns, long enough to catch a glimpse of the man following him. Sure enough, he doesn’t see much, but what he does see is wrong. Skinny and blonde, angles and cheekbones, and his past hurts so much at the ghost of the man Bucky knew.  
  
There’s footsteps ahead of him, and Bucky is thrown enough off balance that he turns to see one of the myriad of attendants that line the walls whenever Loki is around. Everyone here is so much larger than life that they are nearly indistinguishable.  
  
“Are you snooping sir?” The attendant  asks.  
  
"Just taking a walk," Bucky  says, wishing he had pockets to stuff his hands in, he could use an aww shucks sort of look right now.  
  
 "I understand that you are a guest here, I could show you to the courtyard is," the man coughs discreetly, "It's a better place for exercise."  
  
 "I prefer being in an enclosed space," Bucky grins without meaning it, "You know how it can be after a long time at war."  
  
The attendant blinks blankly and does not move. He stands his ground and reaches out for Bucky, his hands finding a patch of skin, and there’s electricity between them.  
  
Bucky's been in a lot of bar fights. He knows the vibe that comes down from above when someone really wants to hit another person. Attendant really would like to hit someone right now. Not inclined to fight an Asgardian at this particular moment, Bucky turns around  and walks back the way he came.  
  
He passes the spot where he saw the phantom, and there's nothing there, but the ghost continues to find him in the back of his mind. He starts to actually run, hoping that the exertion can chase away the memory.  
  
 “You don’t actually want me to go away,”  Steve’s voice is off, hazy, and has the unmistakable impression of being played through another person’s ears. “You carry me with you all the time.” Bucky gets the peculiar feeling that he’s being stepped through, a transitive movement for wisps and whispers of smoke. They solidify in front of him into the Steve that Bucky remembers most. Young and slight, with shoulders that hold a hint to what he would become later. His clothes hang off of him.  
  
If he responds, he’ll have to consider that he’s lost it for good now, because you shouldn’t see the voices in your head (Steve as his conscious isn’t quite new, at least. That bastards been running and telling him to fight since he’d woken up free) and they shouldn’t be solid forms. Bucky could tip him over, he seems so real.  
  
“What’s a kid from Brooklyn doing here?” Not-Steve says, “Were we actually made to deal with gods and immortals?”  
  
Bucky can’t help himself, “It’s right up your alleyway. The righteous fight, righting wrongs. Probably going to end up broken in the end,” If he still has his sanity after this, “but worth it.”  If he pretends he’s just talking to himself, that this is just trying to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing, meddling in another planets affairs, that’s what this apparition will become.  
  
“Funny things happen when you are dead, Bucky. Other people’s squabbles seem less important. It becomes a lot more quiet, peaceful.”  
  
“Easy for you to say, kid. I’ve been dead, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. I’ve been working with other peoples messes since before you were even to my chin. You are talking a lot of shit for a kid that got knocked down  nine times out of ten.”  
  
Bucky closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, it’s the Steve he followed not to rescue in alleyways, but follow into war, suit and all. Steve touches his chest, his shoulders and takes off the cowl, “It’s funny that you don’t remember me like this. You don’t want to remember this kind of fight that took us far from home and each other. We’re dead, sergeant, and maybe it’s time for you to act that way. It’s not giving up, it’s a rest for the weary and the lost.”  
  
It could be easier to be dead, easier to not have to walk through a city that is his, but isn’t. He wouldn’t have to deal with the liars from his past, her shadow that stalks him and mocks him. He’d be willing to die to take away the memories of kill shots, dead little girls, and the terror of being stored away until he was needed again.  
  
Bucky laughs. It’s so small at first, a chuckle of exasperation but then he guffaws. He’s never guffawed in his life but he does it now, “You aren’t Steve,” he realizes, “You aren’t even my conception of Steve.” Steve would cling to life even at it’s worst. He’d pick himself up out of duty, even with sorrow in his heart. He did, until he laid down his bones on an ice sheet and died. He reaches out to touch the imposter in the chest, but his hand goes through what should be skin and bones.  
  
Not-Steve scowls, his nostrils flare, and his face twists in a way that never been seen on Steve. The illusion is sucked away through an unseen vortex before blinking out of existence.  
  
“Fuck,” his left hand rubs his face. This is not good, but at least he’s not going crazy.  
  



	3. Chapter 3

It’s late in the night when Gna knocks at Jane’s door, just as implacable and impressive as she had been earlier in the day, “Please prepare yourself and come with me,” Jane looks at her, blinking several times in quick succession, and then wiping the sleep from her eyes. “Please Lady Jane, at once.”

“Oh! Yes of course.” Jane’s brain wakes up as she realizes that this is what she’s been waiting for. It takes her just a moment to pull her hair back and throw on one of the loose linen gowns that she’s been given to wear. This excursion to Asgard has given her a new appreciation for dresses. Perhaps her mother is right, that you can wear dresses and still have room to move and work. But her mother probably doesn’t have this sort of dress in mind.

Gna doesn’t pass judgement on her half-hearted attempt of clothing at the late hour. But then, Gna isn’t even in her armor, instead wearing a severe cobalt blue dress that buttons at her neck, with a sword slung across her hips. Jane looks about the room, making sure she isn’t forgetting anything. But the only thing she brought of any worth is Mjolnir, and well, that comes when she calls. It’s very handy like that. She’s not going to mention that she has used it as an actual hammer too. It’s great on the stubborn parts of the RESCUE armor. Jane has the feeling that what she views as just being practical, those here in Asgard would see as something akin to sacrilegious.

They don’t even make it pass the next door before it opens. James manages to look attentive, even if he hasn’t gotten the sleep out of his hair yet. Even his eyebrows are going off into strange directions. He’s wearing his own undershirt, and it rides up, like he rolled straight out of the bed to get to the door. It’s not impossible. He sleeps lightly in unfamiliar spaces and whenever they are putting out fires. This is about as strange and on fire as possible, he’s probably lucky to get any sleep.

“Jane?” His voice is pitched so low and soft, it’s got to be an attempt to keep Gna from hearing. It will fail, but James will also try, “You need—“ James yawns, his mouth opening wide as the rest of his face squishes and shakes, “any help?” he finishes.

“I think I’ll be fine,” she resists the urge to smooth out his ridiculous bedhead, “You’ll know if I need back up. Things will go flying through walls.”

James’s lips thin into a line, clearly unhappy but not wanting to press Jane any farther. It’s a good thing that he is so used to women who can hold their own against the world at large, because that look on a man outside of their coterie was usually the start of a lecture. “Breakfast in the morning?” Code, because they’ve had breakfast every morning together. It’s a tradition that started with just her and Darcy and has grown to include everyone, whenever they are together. It’s their standard run-down and discussion time. Plus there’s food, and they all love food.

“Of course,” she replied.

She’s lead into yet another grand chamber, but it’s somewhat simpler than the others. It contains only what appears to be a bier and a body laid on top of it. As she comes closer, she’s joined by more of the handmaidens, each clad in the same severe blue dress. They walk in procession, like a wedding march, to the bier. Jane’s heart feels hard and heavy, and she keeps herself from trembling with trepidation.

Frigga emerges from the shadows as the women fan out and encircle the body, “Behold the rightful ruler of Asgard, Jane Foster,” she states, voice dark and grim with every word, “The one who sits upon the throne may be my son and a prince of the realm, but also a usurper and a thief.”

Odin is not merely asleep. While he breathes, it is with a long pause between the rise and fall of his chest, and there’s the unmistakable sound of a death rattle. Jane witnessed the descent of her own father towards death. She spent hours researching the stages of death, not grieving, so that she could comprehend the devastation and abandonment of his body. The end is not far off for Odin.

“How long has he been like this?” She asks.

“Three months,” Frigga replies, unmoving, “He has been like this since just after he exiled Thor to your world. At first, we thought it just an untimely restoration, as he has done countless times before. But after a year passed and he began to decline, I began to have my doubts. He may simply have worn himself out from heartbreak but….”

“But you do not think this is likely.”

“Yes.” Frigga looks sharply at one of the women, one of the oldest, grey hair bound tight against her head, and she walks out to the dark corners and brings back a slim wooden box, placing it in Frigga’s hands with a bow. Frigga sets it down on the bier next to her husband. “I have sat here each night, watching his breath, listening at every interval, hoping that the next would be when he wakes.” She spreads a hand over the box, “I do not have the skill to interpret this, and I do not trust the men who would understand.”

Jane steps up across from Frigga, as the other woman gravely opens the box. A shot of light bursts up and over Odin, erupting in a tiny firework of orange energy that surrounds him, and begins to move in waves around his body. She lifts her hands and touches a finger to it. A piece of energy stops with her finger and she moves it to another part over his body.

“Is this a quantum field generator?” she asks, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice, but it’s a useless endeavor.

“It’s a soul forge,” one of the handmaidens helpfully provides, as if Jane is going to know by instinct what a soul forge does.

“Does it move molecular energy from one place to another?” Awe creeps into her voice, and she starts to track the natural movement of energy in Odin’s body. It’s slow and sluggish, but it is moving.

“Well, yes.” That woman says with a smile.

“ Quantum field generator,” she says automatically. The levels rise and fall in predictable patterns, rising as he breaths and with his heart beats, falling in the spaces between. “Wait,” she breathes out, thinning down a section to a single file, and then watches as the trickle falls away completely, and does not pick up again. She releases her pinch, so as to not harm Odin further, “It’s being drained.” She places her hands on the slab to try to watch from overhead. “Is there a way to make this bigger? Can I expand it?”

“I do not know,” Frigga knits her eyebrows together looking at the box. She closes her eyes, concentrating further. The youngest of the attendants walks to her, placing her hand over her Queens, closing her eyes as well.

The orange light expands enough to engulf the two of them and Jane. Before long, each of the women are laying hands on Frigga, each adding their own strength and magic power (Jane will never get used to that) and the orange light pushes out further, spreading to fill the entire room. Jane marvels at her own self-contained energy, stuffed thick and pulsing as if two different lives fill her body. She shakes her head and starts following the line of energy that flies out of the room, gaining speed.

She’s taught that experimentation is the key to logic and discovery, but she’s going to take a flying leap here. “Loki is leeching away his life energy.”

Frigga looks pale, “I did not want to believe that he would have that intent, even with all he has done.”

Jane looks at Frigga and bites her lip, and follows the line of energy halfway to the great heavy doors. When she looks back at the Queen, her shoulders slump, “He’s taking it from you as well,” she points to a bare thin line, almost imperceptible at this stage, that starts at Frigga’s feet.

The orange light dissipates suddenly, with the slam of the cover of the box, and Jane watches as Frigga weeps.

* * *

Clint finds a way to listen to the common folk the best way he knows how, by showing off. He finds where they hide the archers, and it’s a real pleasure to be amongst people who train with his weapon as much as he does, and for the same reasons. He can find archers of skill on Earth, it’s not actually that hard, but there are very few that have had to arch for their lives in any meaningful way. Asgard has it’s fill. Line archers. Archers who get caught in the middle of things. They have scars and calluses just like he does and he can tell stories with the best of them.

He can also shoot with the best of them, and okay, that’s a little gratifying too. Practically immortal, and Clint does more than just keep up with them.

Soldiers on Asgard are just like those on Earth, terrible gossips, and probably worse. Asgardian military strategy does not heavily rely on keeping secrets or stealth, even with Loki at the helm. From a cadre of young line archers, he learns of the latest assault on Jotunheim. Asgard has spent the last six months storming through Frost-Giant village after village, methodically setting fires and leaving little behind except a steady stream of very tall and blue refugees.

If Loki isn’t careful, he’s going to have a bigger problem on his hands than a personal vendetta. He’s going to have the vendettas of thousands willing to risk the little they have to bite back. Clint would feel bad for Loki if he weren’t such a scumbag.

The soldier next to him boasting of his prowess stiffens suddenly and bows. Clint turns and sees Loki walk through the mass of men, watching them part as he comes to stand next to Clint.

“How do you assess my men, Barton?” His voice sends a chill behind Clint’s eyes, “Do they meet with your approval?”

“They are exceptional warriors,” Clint keeps his voice light, remembering the way that he answered him before, tight and gruff, without a hint of his humor, “A little over-worked, but as fine a force as I’ve ever seen.”

“Good. I have a great plans,” Loki smiles with half his mouth, “I hope to accomplish them quickly. I do not wish to keep so many of the bravest of Asgard away from their homes.”

Okay, there’s a thing that Clint excels at, and that’s playing dumb and playing straight into what he thinks Loki wants. He’s not the best at playing someone against themselves like Natasha can, but he can play someone against himself fairly well, “I can understand that. The natural wish of a soldier is to be safe and home, no matter how much they tell you otherwise.”

“And is that your wish? To be home?”

“I am a soldier.” Clint nods his head, thinking that this should be enough of a conversation. Letting Loki see a little vulnerability and a hint that they do not wish to stay very long.

“And you have many homes,” Loki touches him, clasping him on the shoulder, his thumb on the base of his neck, and Clint can’t help but shrug off the touch, “Which home do you want to go back to Clint Barton?” There is very little noise except Loki’s voice, and Clint’s hands find a bow near him to fill the rattle in his bones.

“Thanks Bucky,” Darcy says from the door in their room, hours later, “Sleep safe.” Clint hears her try to close it softly, but it slips from her hand and shuts louder than expected, “Sorry.” She’s a vision walking back to him, just a shift and her bare legs.

“I was awake anyways,” Clint still feels a rattling in him, like Loki’s touch scooped up marrow and replaced it with marbles. He draws himself out of bed, reaches out for Darcy, his last connection to something solid.

“Jane was summoned,” she’s cold and closed off, barely reacting to his touch, even if her voice feels warm. She’s been increasingly tense ever since they decided to stay in Asgard and Clint doesn’t know how to even address it, “We should know something in the morning, I guess.”

“Jane doesn’t work that fast.”

“Jane will work exactly as fast as she needs to.” Darcy moves past him, heading back to the bed.

Don’t poke the sleeping bear, Clint, don’t poke the sleeping bear. “Okay, I give,” that’s right, poke the sleeping bear, what’s the worst that can happen. Clint pushes down his crap, the way his neck still feels frostbitten, “What the hell is wrong Darcy?”

“I’m fine, Clint. I want to sleep, so let’s sleep.” Darcy pulls the blankets back, starts to get in and Clint is tired. Tired of her pulling away whenever he expresses any concern for her. He’s trying to do all of the right things with her, make his life here, and Darcy’s false cheer and acidic tongue are worsening by the day.

“You aren’t fine. You aren’t — look at you Darcy. You’ve gotten so thin that they had to make new clothes for you here. You snap at everyone, you fight with Jane. I get it, you don’t really want to be here. I understand that feeling spectacularly well, but you don’t have to take your anger out on us.”

Darcy stops, halfway into bed and slowly twists to face him, “You want to keep telling me how I am supposed to feel and act?” Her eyes are terrifyingly blank, like a veil has dropped over them, and Darcy physically changes. “How am I supposed to act, Barton. Like you? Happy to be in a place that isn’t my own? I remember you not taking that very well either.”

Clint swallows, but if they are going to at it, they might as well get it over with, “And you called me on it, babe. I’m dealing with it, best I can. What you’ve got goes a little farther than just being in Asgard. You were hard up and uneasy even while we were out in New Mexico.”

Darcy roughly knocks his shoulder as she storms past him, to a chair where she had laid out the new dresses, “You’ve got one thing right. I’m angry.” Clint wants to reach his hand out to her, wants to tell her that it’s okay, they can talk later. When she’s ready, but there’s something ugly in his throat.

“When weren’t you angry, Darce?”

Darcy ducks her head into a loose-fitting dark gown, and when she emerges, she looks more like a harbinger than a simple dangerous woman, “I have the right to be angry, Barton.” She stays hunched over, her head twisted up and staring at him, “It’s the only right that I have.”

Clint tries to say something meaningful, but the only thing that comes out is, “Come to bed?”  
Darcy shakes her head, “No, no I don’t think so Barton.” She pulls herself up to her full height, shoves her feet into her own shoes, and walks out the door.

Clint sits on the bed and every single thought that comes to him isn’t his own voice, but a wicked taunt from Loki, clear and chill, and he desperately struggles to keep it from taking root.

* * *

She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s absolutely fine. Darcy has gone through so many hallways that they all seem to merge together in a massive gold blur. She’s fine, she’s not angry, she’s pissed off. That’s a transient emotion, right? You get pissed off and then you aren’t and it’s okay to feel that way. Her steps make a racket, echoing further and further down, louder and louder in her head until all she can hear is the noise. It drowns out the din in her head, the relentless beating that clouds her thoughts these days.

Man, fuck Clint and fuck what he thinks of her. She’s fine. She’s not angry, she’s just pissed off. She’d just rather be at home trying to undermine AIM or HYDRA rather than be here. This is a bigger problem than she can handle. She wasn’t ever going to be a diplomat, not even if she had finished her degree. She was going to be a lawyer, maybe, or just be a pain in the ass at the family reunion and tell her uncle he was wrong. Fuck Clint, she’s not angry. Angry people can’t keep it together like she does. They don’t laugh and smile and keep going on like she does.  
Darcy just wants to go home. Her footsteps are so loud that it almost feels like she is walking on her own body. Like she can’t be contained by skin and bone anymore. She’s fine, this is okay, she’s shaking because she’s pissed at Clint, she’s not angry. These are separate emotions. Darcy locks her hands together behind her head and squeezes, trying to push herself back into the space her body is supposed to take up, and takes shaking breaths to calm herself down. She has to think logically, rationally. She can’t be who Coulson wanted her to be if she can’t step back and just observe the emotion and let it go.

“Madame?” The voice stops her in her tracks, cool and liquid over her ears. Realizing she’s hunched over, she tilts her head so that she can look Loki in the eye, “Madame Darcy, is that correct?”

“Yes,” her voice sounds strange, a hundred miles away. She straightens, a curious sensation, her spine coming into alignment, vertebrate stacking on top of each other. Everything settles, and she no longer feels like an itch under her skin.

“Are you lost?” Loki’s voice is amused and unlike every time she has seen him so far, he doesn’t seem puffed up and maintaining a hold on those around him. He just seems concerned, even a little bit wary.

He should be wary, Darcy thinks, for she is as dangerous as he is. He’s a schemer, she knows, but Darcy’s a planner. She’s used to working steps ahead of everyone else. She slaps her hands against her legs with frustration, “Yes! I haven’t seen anyone around and I keep getting turned around and I -- where am I?”

“You’ve managed to find your way to our personal hall,” he touches her arm, on the bare skin where her sleeves have fallen back on themselves. The touch is what was needed to finally ground her again, and she isn’t shaking quite so much, “Will you allow me to escort you back to the guest quarters?”

“That sounds like an excellent idea.”

Loki slips her arm into his and leads her back through the halls. He points out architecture and details, and secrets behind doors. She doesn’t hear much of it as she tries to memorize the way back to the guest rooms, a mental trail of breadcrumbs for future reference. She absently says yes when Loki tells her he wants to show her something and pulls her into a room bathed in shadows and what looks like a pool of water.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” she asks, thoroughly unimpressed because she can see water pretty much everywhere.

“Give it a moment,” Loki pulls open a curtain, light streaming forth illuminating the pool. The water is crystal clear and she peers over it, looking at her reflection.

She looks tired and worn. Her hair is a mess, her eyes dull, and her skin lifeless. Darcy kneels down, sitting back on her heels, reaching out to touch the surface.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” Loki warns, “You see yourself as you are right now. A true reflection, better than any mirror, where your soul and your physical self merge.”

“What do you look like?” Darcy asks and knows it is the wrong thing to say, it shows too much of their hand.

“I have not looked in years. I fear I may not know myself,” Loki states, eyes and hands expressive, that much showing in the surface of the water, “You, however, are a sea of troubles, are you not? When you looked at yourself, you were…disturbed.”

Darcy looks over the edge once again and her hair slips and falls, skimming the water. There’s a deep gurgle and a solid mass rises up from the center pool, water restrained and contained by some force that Darcy couldn’t name. Loki doesn’t protest when she reaches out to touch it, finding it solid and cold, but he lays his hand on her shoulder.

“This one shows you as you want to be,” his voice curls around her like smoke, “Let’s see what the woman desires of herself.”

It’s an illusion, she thinks, because Darcy looks nothing like herself. Taller, stronger, and sleek, more dangerous than she’s ever been before. The her in the mirror smiles with determination, before turning away. The longer she looks at the image, the deeper it becomes and she’s aware of Loki in the background saying, “Well, well, looks like you have a motivation outside of dear Jane Foster.” The background emerges and Darcy recognizes it as a stronghold on Madripoor that Darcy has been advocating a small scale invasion of, but no one much listens to her. She’s always dismissed as thinking too big with their limited resources. But here, here she has people behind her, kitted out in ways that hasn’t been seen since before SHIELD crumbled.

She’s transfixed, watching the scene play out, she can’t move her hand away to stop the production in front of her. Darcy wants to see, wants to see the bodies and the blood and it doesn’t disgust her at all.

“It’s satisfying, isn’t it? Getting what you want. What must be suffered and sacrificed to attain all that you desire most. To appease your anger and your vengeance?”

She doesn’t recognize the force she’s leading, but it’s clear they aren’t mere humans. They are Asgardians, and fighting with shields and with swords and with guns, armor shining and deadly. The ground is stained with blood, it splatters on her boots, and it pleases Darcy to give in like this. To enjoy it, letting them be crushed to the ground like when they took away all those people precious to her.

“I can bring it to you, Darcy.” Loki’s breath brushes her ear, his hand creeping across her shoulder until its wrapped around her and he touches her cheek, an imitation of an intimacy that they do not share. Darcy is transfixed and never wants to stop listening to his voice, to give in to what’s been devouring her heart and mind for months, “I don’t require more than your confidence, and I can bring your enemies to their knees.” His fingers are cold against her cheek, and it feels like frost crystallizing under her skin where his fingers lie.

It can’t hurt. She can play Loki, get a little of this vision before her and meet the team’s goals here in Asgard. Darcy is Control and the calm in the rising chaos of battle, and she’s fine, fantastically fine. A slow, thirsty smile builds on her face, “What would you have me do?”

* * *

“I think I’m going to do it,” Bucky rubs his cheek and chin, peering into the gold surrounding Heimdall, “I’ve been inspired. I’m going to grow a beard.”

“You have had them before,” Heimdall says with a hesitant lightness, “Do you think that’s wise?”

“Well, after it gets past the patchy stage, I look pretty good, don’t I?” Bucky didn’t have to grow to like Heimdall, because Heimdall is a bit of familiarity. Bucky is used to being watched, being measured, of living in the panopticon of the Soviet’s reach. He’s used to the dour humor, and is grateful for the hope that the guardian has in the long reach of years.

Heimdall truly believes that given long enough, all will be made right and justice will prevail. Bucky remembers believing like that, and will support anyone that makes him feel like that again. So he’s spent time here, standing with Heimdall as he stands watch over the known universe.

“There are things that hide from my sight,” He responds with a low amused rumble, “The attractiveness of your facial hair shall be placed in that category.”

“I can’t believe I ever let you out of my sight,” Jane enters Heimdall’s hall, skirts flying because of how briskly she moves, Barton strolling along behind her, “There is work to be done and you are here chitchatting about your inability to grow a beard?”

“I have the ability!” He announces, raising his hands up because that’s going to help him make his point. He can grow a beard, a good one. He’s going to have to prove it now. “It’s just going to take awhile to catch up to the heights of sophistication here in Asgard.”

“Barnes, back home, that’s not sophistication. That just makes you a hipster.” Barton laughs in spurts, stopping abruptly when the tone of the hall changes to solemn when Frigga enters, one of her handmaidens taking up residence just outside.

Everyone stands up a bit straighter, except for Heimdall, who bows his head. Frigga lays a hand upon his shoulder. It looks like a comfort and an apology. She looks at the assemblage of people, “We are missing somebody, are we not?”

“Give Darcy another minute,” Clint drops his good-natured smile and turns it into a long and dour expression, “She had a rough night.”

“I have said it before, but the depths of my sorrow is greater than any river or ocean, dear Heimdall. Through my folly and my blindness, I have allowed great harm to come to you. In my grief for my son and his companions, including your own sister, I have not seen what my other son has done to those who remain.”

Clint mutters, just loud enough for her to hear, “He is not your son,” and he directs his gaze down to the ground, eyes set on some distant thought.

“He is my son. I have failed somewhere in his raising, but I love him as if he were my own flesh, archer. We do not stop loving those that do us great harm just because it is convenient to do so. I must take my own responsibility for him, and I do that with my heart.”

Darcy slides in, her breath hard and heavy, cutting off Heimdall’s reply, “I am very sorry. I got lost,” her smile is bright and unfocused, no sign of the tightness that Bucky has observed in her, like some great loosening happened during the night.

Bucky looks at Clint, who furrows his brows, his lips turned up in a quizzical smile. Bucky has years of reading people, and whatever has happened with Darcy, Clint did not have part of it.  
Darcy settles in, but her lightness has sweetened the mood in the hall a fraction, and as Jane explains what is happening to Odin and Frigga, she asks, “We need to determine our timeframe, so please, excuse my bluntness. How long does Odin have?”

“A few weeks, perhaps,” Jane answers, looking to Frigga for confirmation, “I don’t know the threshold before he more or less collapses on himself.”

“And if we stop it now, what will happen?” Darcy asks, “Is it worth it? Can he even recover?”

“Darce!” Jane shakes her head, “How can you even ask —“

“No, it is an honest question,” Bucky interjects, because it is -- it’s cold and ruthless, but if there is no hope, the plans will have to change. They could focus on saving Frigga and discrediting Loki on a slightly longer time frame.

“One of our great gifts is that we can endure and recover from many things, and grow strong. It will take much time by your years, but he can recover,” Heimdall answers.

“My Lady,” Jane turns to Frigga, “I think we can work together to discover a way to put a stopper in this leak. I don’t quite get how your magic works, but Thor made it sound like,” she stumbles over her words for a moment, “like it was something I could grasp eventually.”

Frigga moves her gaze over Jane with the force of a memory, “Yes, I think a partnership between us will be very fruitful.”

“We can run the ground here, figure out what Loki has planned,” Bucky offers and nods at Clint, “See where his weak spots are.”

“Besides overestimating his own cleverness?” Clint snorts.

“Be wary of your overconfidence,” Heimdall booming voice grabs everyone’s attention. “Even I am not able to keep Loki in my sight, and his schemes and mechanisms are often the most shrouded of his deeds. It will be most difficult to keep him from discovering our plans.”

“Don’t you worry about Loki,” Darcy says with a small, calculating smile, “I think I can run interference. He’s taken a shine to me.”

Clint looks at her and Bucky can see the hair on his neck prick up in wariness, “What do you mean?”

“I got lost, he directed me out of the area I got myself lost in. I’m very personable, you know.” Darcy explains. She’s holding something back from them in her smile, she’s not as good as schooling all of her features as Bucky is, or even Clint. It’s not yet ingrained by years of practice.

They don’t meet for much longer, Frigga’s absence will be noticed before long, and it’s too early to draw more suspicion than they already have. Jane follows Frigga out the door, flanked by a handmaiden, her early questions flowing easily from her mouth. Darcy touches Clint tentatively, murmurs something to him, and his shoulders have lost the tenseness he had been holding throughout their meeting.

“I still think I’d look good with a beard,” Bucky says to Heimdall, “I haven’t had one in a long time. At least not an intentional one.”

“Perhaps it will serve you better this time,” Heimdall replies with sedate humor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My biggest thanks go to fireun, my beta, who is just doing a bangup job whipping this into shape. As usual, y'all can find me at [ my tumblr](http://twistedingenue.tumblr.com)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot thank fireun enough for being my dedicated beta on this fic. May no one else ever see my first drafts. She finds when i accidentally a word (or phrase, or sentence...) 
> 
> As always, you can find me at [ my tumblr](http://twistedingenue.tumblr.com)

The little bead of energy that flows away from Frigga continues at a slow steady pace out the door on its way to to wherever it goes. It slipped through the contraption that Jane had absently made in a stubborn attempt to get them to pool up and somehow she’d figure out a way to stuff them back into Frigga.

“Great,” Jane mutters, as the beads fizzle away in her hands, “You wanted to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, didn’t you, Foster?” she blows a wisp of hair from out of her eyes.

“When did you last sleep?” Frigga says from where she sits in front of a giant loom, her fingers deftly moving over the yarn. She had spent the day before with a great distaff and spindle, turning out what seemed like miles upon miles of iridescent thread. In the warmth of Frigga’s great hall it reflects in burnt red-golds that flame out into whiteness.

“A few hours last night,” Jane answers, biting her lip, returning to her papers and observations. So far, she has ruled out collecting the energy and diverting it back where it came from. It soaks through her equipment, burns through walls, and slips through her fingers, “I think stopping it is our only solution here, no mere stopgap is going to work. We just can’t buy our time that way.”

Frigga had spent the morning wrapping the thread lengthwise on the loom, and it’s frustrating Jane. She is supposed to learning from Frigga, but all she does is sit there, sometimes so close to the yarns that her eyelashes touch. She stays like that even now, eyes open and her hand spread wide against what little she has woven.

“You should sleep, Jane.” Frigga’s voice is warm with a day’s weary work, but it’s familiar in a way that Jane doesn’t expect, “And perhaps you should eat something, I doubt you have moved from that spot since the sun came up.”

“If it was time for me to eat, Darcy would….” Jane sits upright, looking towards the door. Darcy hasn’t been in all day, and the sun has nearly set. “Darcy would be in here to mother me. I shouldn’t impose upon you to take care of me.”

“If I do not mother you, who can benefit from my affection?” Frigga stands up in a refined stretch and walks across the room slowly, “I have one son dead and another who steals my soul away from me.” She smiles without joy, “If nothing else is accomplished in your time here, at least I will have the comfort of seeing Thor’s legacy.”

Before Loki saps away her life too. Jane does not envy Frigga’s position, discovering the depths to which Loki has fallen, and having to fight the child she raised. Jane doesn’t particularly enjoy it, but in her heart, she cannot leave Asgard to fall to ruin and disrepute. If only she understood what she was seeing, if only comprehension didn’t remain just outside her capability. She rubs her eyes, hoping that it will wipe away whatever it is that is blocking her from seeing how the soul energy transfer was working. Whatever underlies Asgardian magic is still science, Thor said, and she has no reason not to believe that.  
“What is it that you are doing?” Jane asks.

“I’m weaving, child.” Frigga answers with a smile.

“At least I understand that concept,” Jane walks to Frigga, “But what are you weaving?”

Frigga slowly uncurls from her spot over the loom, “I’m looking for possibilities, Jane. I have built what we know into the warp.” She picks at individual strands, “Odin, Thor, Loki, what has been done to Heimdall, the deaths of Sif and the Warriors Three, your arrival, all amongst what I know of Loki’s mischief and lies. My success and my failures.”

Jane inspects the loom and the tapestry. Jane has never had the patience for art or craft. She may be able to wait hours in the cold for a glimpse of stars, but she’s never had the inclination for this. All Jane sees is tightly woven thread and then the loose ones.

“I must confess,” she says, “I don’t get this.”

“The warp is what has been done, the knowable and the fixed. The weft however, are actions. Some we have taken,” she stops her hands at one thread, gleaming gold, “Such as calling out to Heimdall. Others are the possibilities of what we might do. Between the actions we have taken, and the actions we could take, I can see many realities.”

Jane looks closer at the tapestry, struggling to find the patterns and constants that Frigga seemed to pick up so easily. She wants to look at it like a map, but that doesn’t seem right. Maps are relatively constant, or at least they should give a singular, sometimes skewed and biased, way to see things. Frigga’s tapestry is not a map, not just a piece of art.

It’s a multiverse created thread by thread. Jane can try to understand it that way at the very least. Look past the nonsensical visuals, unbalanced and ugly, and see it for what it may well be, a way to navigate layers of universe created by a single thought and the beat of actions.

“I have taken just a small part of our problem, how my husband lies nearly cold, and am searching within the past, the now and the what may be. If I can perhaps find a tiny rip, a tear, or even just a thinness of thread that will allow me to investigate further, I can narrow down our best course of action to repair this great wound.”

“A great wound,” Jane repeats, the words mulling in her throat, “I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.” Her head reels and she has to reorient herself, as thoughts flood into her mind. Jane sorts through them all, choosing the ones most relevant as she walks back to Odin. She splays her hand against the bier, kneeling as she does so, “Instead of trying to navigate the flow back, like a loop, we should be looking for how it gets out in the first place.”

“We have examined him, Jane. Before and after he began to grow weaker.”

“But what if it isn’t, what if it’s this,” she flicks her fingers at the platform, “What if the mechanism is in this,” Jane runs her hand across the cool stone, and follows it until she reaches the steady line of Odin’s life, “the injury is in here Frigga.”

“How would it be effecting me then?” Frigga rises from her chair, and moves to Jane’s side, stopping at her shoulder and as if she’s completing a needed circuit, touches Odin with a still sadness.

Jane sits back on her heels to think this through, follow the line of half-guessed hypotheticals and turn it into theory and discover the fact. Frigga stands at a standstill beside her, reaching out as if she were already a widow in mourning. “Do you…spend a lot of time here?” Jane thinks of her mourning before she assumed Thor’s role, when she was just a woman pouring out her grief at a convenient hammer memorial. Frigga is silent, but nods once, “Have you ever laid down next to him on the bier?”

Frigga nods again, exhaling and shedding tears, “Yes, I have, Jane Foster.”

“Then I think I know where to focus.” Frigga’s fingertips graze the stone with quiet intimacy before she returns to her loom, adjusting her skirts when she sits.

The air around Frigga blurs and glows like a low-burning fire as she begins to weave in earnest now, and she speaks words that Jane does not understand under her breath. All about the room, echoes appear and disappear, fragments of memory that seem to come from the walls themselves. They are people, servants and warriors, Frigga herself a near figure that stands lonely aside the bier, or climbing on top of it.

Then there is Loki, and the entire hall burns with the same light as the ghostly figure lifts Odin up, and with a surprisingly gentleness, lays him on the floor. The bier burns hotter, even though when Jane touches it, it’s still cold. But the glow turns so hot, it burns blue, and Jane can hardly see the figure anymore, just that he manipulates the slab.

And then the hall returns to normal. Jane touches the bier again. Did Loki coat the top with something? Pinpricks into Odin and into Frigga, so slight that the Queen wouldn’t notice? It could be just as simple as healing the wound, stitching it together and tying a knot.

Jane almost has it now and even Loki himself cannot stand in her way when she’s dragging herself to a conclusion.

* * *

 

Clint can understand how Darcy got lost. He might be lost at this moment. The immensity of the palace is tempered only by it’s relative sameness, most hallways are so elaborate either in scale, carvings, or gilt that they all begin to look the same. But the nice thing about being a relatively small man in a land made for people a full head taller than he is that he slips through better than he expects.

He slips in and out of rooms, usually finding nothing. But here and there, there are maps and figures. “I sing of arms and the man,” he mutters under his breath when he realizes that he’s looking at an inventory, troop movements and requisitions. Asgard is at war, of course, but is it at this much war? How many fronts is Loki going to fight on? He makes a mental mark of every room that holds some interesting tidbit as he makes a cursory go of this wing of the palace.

Darcy is standing outside of a door that Clint hasn’t been in yet. His system of trying to ferret out Loki’s motivations isn’t really systematic, just intuitive. Loki wants something, Clint will find out what. Darcy looks up at him with a little bit of wild behind her eyes before she squares away her expression into a semblance of cheer. It’s a fucking tell. Darcy is still hiding something away from him, something important, and he doesn’t even know why.

“Babe,” she says, “Looking for something?”

Many things, but right now it’s whatever she’s hiding, “Aren’t I always?” Clint takes note of where he is, and who is almost often down this hall. It’s part of the, for the lack of a better term, royal suites, where Odin and Frigga raised their boys to become princes. But it looks far too used to be Thor’s, no dust. Even in the land of a hundred servants, a disused area will always attract dust.

Why is Darcy dealing with Loki here at all?

Darcy bites her lip with a bit of mischief and teasing, and every hook and hollow of her body is telling him that she’s lying through her teeth without her having to say a single word.

“Why are you guys down here?” Jane says from the threshold of the corridor, walking speaking faster than she realizes than she realizes, “We figured it out!”

Clint grabs hold of Jane’s arm, reeling her in beside him and hopes that by all the gods that are fucking present, that she understands that the pressure he’s placing on her arm means to stop running her mouth.

“That’s fantastic, Jane.” Darcy says, her mouth pouring into a grin, her eyes darting slightly. “Are you going to be able to save Odin?”

Jane touches Clint’s arm with her free hand, “Oh,” her face falls, “we don’t know yet. I guess I got a little carried away with knowing that we at least stopped the loss of his life’s power,” she glances down and looks all the world like she’s mad at herself, eyes darting back and forth in worry, “If I had just called out a few weeks earlier, maybe it would be more certain, but…” she lets it hang, and shifts her weight, “I think we’re supposed to dress for dinner tonight, but I need to tell Heimdal. Darce, can you go to my room and find me something?”

“You got it boss,” Darcy responds with an eye roll. The three of them exit to the main corridor together, Jane asking Clint to walk with her. Darcy leans up and kisses Clint on the cheek, and he leans into it, her mouth warm and soft against his skin.

“What was that about?” Jane hisses, forgetting her strength as she takes Clint’s hand off of her arm.

“Something’s not right with Darcy,” Clint answers under his breath. Jane doesn’t do subtle one bit, Darcy’s barely out of earshot.

Jane’s voice drops with worry, “She looked fine. Happy, even. Better mood than she’s been in for weeks.”

“Yeah, and doesn’t that concern you at all? Sudden change in her mood? Something isn’t right and,” he takes a deep breath, “I don’t want her to have all of our information right now.”

“Odin will most likely live.” Jane says, “80-20 odds in his favor, although it may take a decade of sleep for him to wake. We’ve tied up his wounds, and we know how to do it for Frigga.”

Clint stops Jane again, this time just holding up his aching hand. “You didn’t stop hers?”

Jane smiles by inches, “No, we didn’t want to show all of our hand. Loki wasn’t taking much from his mother; a trickle, not a flood. It is a knot easily re-opened.”

It will be good to see what Loki does with this development. If he’s siphoning off power for something he needs, then when his supply grows limited…. Well, desperate people are easier to catch.

* * *

 

It does make her uneasy how she can feel Loki summoning her through dinner. It’s a nip at her heels and draw at her feet urging her to walk away from Clint and Jane and come to him. It’s unnerving and so compelling that as the food and feasting winds down, she does beg off with a sly smile and her best twinkle in her eye.

“I’ll keep him busy, go snoop,” she says to Clint and Bucky, “I’m just going to go talk my pretty little head off about absolutely nothing, and he’s going to find me utterly sweet. Just like you.”

“Be careful Darce,” Clint says, “He’s far too good at promising the world and not delivering.”

This is true. Tonight, she’s going to demand that Loki delivers. If he wants his precious information, Darcy is going to demand he deliver tonight. Whether that information is correct or accurate, well that’s Darcy’s prerogative. This is the best way to deal with Loki, feed him falsehoods flavored with the truth so that he takes actions on the wrong things, and get her revenge at the same time.

It’s beautiful. That’s what it is. But the urge to walk and follow Loki is unnerving, and by the time she’s in that room again, staring into the water, she feels bright and focused. Loki hasn’t entered the room yet, so Darcy looks at her reflection, but the pool stubbornly refuses to show her anything but her own face just the way it looked when she left her room earlier. But what a change! What a change from how she looked just days ago, when she was running ragged and half dead.

Even her hair has life again. She feels fine. Darcy feels absolutely fine.

Darcy hears Loki’s footfalls, “Does it only work when you are around?”

“It does rely on the use of magic, you must possess it before you can trigger the reaction needed to show your desire,” Loki admits, “Something your kind does not find easily.”

“Humans don’t have magic?” Darcy asks, interested in the implications.

Loki turns his head and smiles without showing his teeth. “Miss Darcy,” oh he’s been observant, learning how humans address each other, “The world is stranger that you’d expect. It is a rare gift, but it has always been present on your little world, causing trouble.”

The water begins to turn and fizz, and Darcy’s breath begins to quicken and her heart races, because she needs to see. The water endlessly churns in a vortex, never settling on an image, but offering glimpses of several. She came here for a reason, she could have ignored his summons. Darcy just needs to pull the ball back into her own court. She’s going to win here.

“I need proof,” Darcy says firmly, turning away from the pillar, to face Loki, “I have what you want. You need to do something I want.”

“You haven’t given me anything yet, my dear,” his soft voice flows past her, promising force and menace.

“And neither have you,” The thing is, she can negotiate her terms. Right now, all they have is an agreement. Neither have done anything they can’t walk away from without being right where they started. Loki hasn’t messed with Earth politics and she hasn’t spilled anything that they are doing to mess with Asgardian. “Forgive a mortal for hoping you’ll move on a slightly less stately time scale.”  
Here’s the other thing. Darcy thinks Loki likes her. Oh, he views her as insignificant to be sure, but he seems to appreciate the things the ant says to the wolf

“Very well,” he answers as he directs her attention back to the pool, “Let’s reach in and see what you would have me offer.”

Darcy’s thought a lot about this, where she would direct a blow against the combined forces that have torn SHIELD apart. Loki’s not going to invade Madripoor right off for her. He needs something that will show a victory but not tax him too much.

“Ichor,” she says, and the base of operations that Hydra uses when they want to meet with AIM in large numbers solidifies before her. It’s not unlike the Helicarrier, has many of the same uses, except they submersed where SHIELD flew. It’s spending a great deal of time out in the Indian Ocean lately, and would be an easy target for destruction.

“What does it mean for you?” Loki asks, genteel and courteous. Like he cares.

Darcy can’t tear her eyes away, “It’s where they have hatched the plans that have destroyed my life,” she says truthfully, “And I want it gone from my planet.”

Loki sighs, “It still will not be easy, ambitious little thing that you are. It does not take a significant portion of our firepower. Two of our flyers can take it out quite easily - it’s the power to get there that will be the hard part.” He waves his hand and stalks around the image, “For obvious reasons, we will not go through the bifrost. No, that would not be wise. Heimdal, after all.” He cocks his head, “He will know the moment I do this, of course. He pays particular attention to your world.”

Darcy does not care, because in the image she’s watching a series of explosions, and Ichor sinks without anything to protect the people on board. They drown. Again and again they drown and it’s beautiful. If they can time it right, then there’s a good chance they can do it when Madame Hydra and whoever is the current Scientist Supreme at AIM are there. It won’t last long, it never does, but the disarray will be exhilarating.

“But you can do it,” Darcy states a little bit breathless again.

Loki is behind her again, and she’s absolutely fine, her heart’s not racing when he’s behind her, cradling her face in his hand, “Now all you need to do is tell me what your friends are up to, turn your wish into reality.”

She means to hold back, hide bits of what she knows, but once she starts talking, all that image does is burn brighter and more vivid. Darcy can almost touch the violence, is almost there with the possibilities, and she drowns right alongside them, but lives. And doesn’t stop talking until Loki is gone, leaving the cold, still waters behind.

* * *

 

Bucky believes in last ditch attempts and taking about a million chances, but trusting things at face value is one of those chances he’s not prepared to take. Oh sure, he trusts that Jane is doing her best with Frigga and doesn’t hope to understand the level that she’s working at. The door to where they keep Odin is heavy, and he has to put a little weight into it if he wants to manipulate it open without making too much noise.

It’s just a room. Too large by half, gaudy and ornate like every other room in this place, but the stark edition of an old man lying on a stone bier is strange and simple in comparison. He looks dead, laid in state for all to see. Except no one does, no one mourns. Not even the decency of a coffin, a casket. Just the robes he fell in.

“Well, here’s to the dead who are still living,” Bucky says, shaking his head. He feels a sort of kinship with the king, because maybe you should just let those clinging to life let go. He might be projecting a little bit, though.

The footfalls aren’t obvious at first, but Bucky’s already moving to a less visible area of the room when the door opens. He’s behind a column in the shadows by the time he sees that it’s Loki. Bucky goes completely still, doesn’t want to make a single noise, just wants to see what Loki is doing here. It might help Jane.

He’s spent enough time not in control of himself that he knows how to take fewer breaths, and make them completely inaudible.

Loki runs his finger along the edge of the platform, “I figured it was time for a chat, father,” he says with a dry arrogance, “You wanted us to be gifted rulers, did you not? But how did you want us to rule? Where did you want our rule to end, father?”

It’s curious, how Loki says we. Is it an affectation? The royal we. Or is it a by-product of the closeness of siblings. Sometimes, when memories are a little close to the surface, Bucky still thinks in terms of we, rather than of him by himself.

“If I were concerned with making you proud, would you care? The foundling, abandoned by his own and brought into the home and hall of enemies as their own. That is who will unite all the realm under his rule. Not Odin, not Thor.”

If there is a god, a real one who isn’t an alien, they should save him from monologuing villains.  
“Of course, since they are being united under a cuckoo, raised so knowingly as their own, you can’t expect that the monster won’t seep through. It will take blood and pain to bring all of the nine worlds together, bound by more than just a bridge and Yggdrasil.” Loki is deathly calm, a sneer blossoming across his face, one that he is in full control of, “But Father, you taught me that sometimes we must get a little dirty. In the end, they will kneel because it is easier than resisting.”

Loki flattens his hand down, and closes his eyes in an expectant manner. A soft orange glow emanates from his touch, filling his hand for a few seconds. But it’s just a brief flare, and grows cold quickly. Loki’s eyebrows raise and his head tilts in surprise, “Interesting,” he says, almost an afterthought, “The girl was right. They have discovered what I have done to you.

Bucky struggles to keep his breath quiet. Staying still has always been a problem and a triumph of will. But he won’t move, this is important and he can struggle through his natural inclination to try to look from a hundred angles at once.

“I’ve learned about the Midgardians and how they’ve fared since we last meddled and walked among them. I quite like them. Still so easy to cow and impress. Fooled by little more than a child’s illusions. But some have a philosophy that I can admire. They believe in peace through destruction, that those that threaten this peace are tracked and exterminated. Even before they can do anything to threaten the regime. This foolish girl has told me much of her enemy, and all I see is the beauty in their methods.Humans will call a smokescreen freedom as long as they are kept secure, kept entertained. I will have this woman under my thumb as long as I keep her blood thirst slaked. The rest will be just as easily subdued. They will kneel before me and kneel with pleasure.”

Bucky watches as Loki lifts his hand and stares at it, “They can be tricky, Father, clever for such limited creatures, but eventually her cleverness will come to it’s natural limits.”  
Loki starts to turn away, walk back to the door, in a graceful stride. He pivots on his heel at the last moment, and Bucky shivers with the sudden chill that fills the room, “Thank you Father, for this chat,” Loki says, every inch of him a charming lie, “I regret that we will not have many more.”

Bucky waits until long after the door has shut behind Loki to find his way to Barton. And it is Barton that he seeks out, not Jane. Jane has always had a blind spot in her eye for Darcy, not able to see that she’s been falling fast. Barton has too, but he’s not from here, he understands that there is trouble in this woman, an unsettling that is fast becoming instability.

Barton, for his part, after Bucky manhandles him into his room, settles on the floor against the bed. He wipes his face with his hands and looks up at Bucky with narrow, steeled eyes, “I’ve suspected. Barnes, you’ve got to believe me though, I don’t think she’s a traitor.”

“She sure as hell looks like one, Clint.” Bucky cuts through the bullshit with the blade of his name, “It doesn’t matter though, because right now she’s a tool to be used.” He is intimately aware of what it is liked to be used as little more than warm-blooded knife, but you have to use what you’ve got. Maybe an earlier Darcy would understand; when you allow yourself to be a weapon, you will become nothing but one.

“We can feed Loki information.” Barton agrees, “We can’t let her know we are onto her.” Barton shakes his head, “Whatever it is that Darcy’s thinking she’s doing, she believes it to be the best course of action for us and Asgard.”

No, Bucky thinks, but doesn’t say, she believes it to be the way to accomplish her own goals, “Of course,” he agrees with Clint, to smooth it over, because they are both men who know what it is like to be held in thrall, “Loki is powerful enough to do just that.” Bucky sits down beside him, “He came to me, I think, he came to me as Steve and tried to convince me that I was better off dead.”

“Would you be?” Clint asks, serious and searching. He’s looking to see if he’s going to have to deal with Bucky falling apart on him just like Darcy.

“No,” Bucky says easily, “I’d rather live a hard life than not live at all.” It’s even true, he thinks, and isn’t that a comfort in all of this. James Buchanan Barnes, a sergeant, a soldier, a traitor , villain and hero, wants to count himself among the living.


	5. Chapter 5

There are days Jane wishes she had a sword and not a hammer. As useful as a hammer is, and and with so many roles — tool, weapon, paperweight — a sword has one very special use. She wanted to separate a head from it’s body. Jane wasn’t usually one for bloodthirst and fighting, but she wants Loki’s days to be numbered. They should be counting down the hours and planning a mess of a fight.

Instead James cuts her off at the quick, telling her that they change nothing about how they act. It is business as usual. “If Loki even suspects that we know what we know about his plans? Then this is all for nothing, all that you’ve learned and discovered.”

“He’s murdering his father,” Jane says, “His mother. He’s doing I don’t know what to Darcy.” Jane thinks on what James reported from his eavesdropping, on Clint signaling that Jane’s trust in Darcy should be curtailed. Jane doesn’t want to believe that Darcy would willingly follow Loki, doesn’t even want to believe that she could be duped by him. Most of all, Jane hates how much she’s angry at Darcy. How dare she, after everything they’ve been through together, willingly believe anything Loki would tell her.

The very first thing they saw coming to Asgard was Heimdall standing tall while partially encased in gold. Loki is not a kind man, he is a man bent on tyranny, and those that oppose him will suffer.

‘Kneel with pleasure,’ Bucky had told her, Loki’s plan and threat for them all. This she believes quite easily. There have always been men like him; who have tasted power and want more and think nothing of the people under their heels. It’s why she’s willing to fight HYDRA and AIM, who offer peace in the form of pacification, to prop up a petty picture of human superiority.

“Can you tell us anything about Darcy,” she asks Heimdall, “Can you see anything that might help us tell what she’s up to?”

“Loki has hidden much of his dealings from me, it is a magic that he learned as a child and has mastered. His personal areas have been lost from my vision for quite some time. Until quite recently, he had told me that he only wished privacy. I did not entirely believe him, but understood the need. He was not quite like the rest of us, and had need of retreat.”

Jane almost feels for Loki for a moment. This life would be hard on one who did not possess the innate drive to be bold and brash, but rather enjoy internal, quiet complexities. Then she remembered that Loki is killing his adoptive father, his mother, provided the means for Thor, Sif and the Warriors deaths, and likely has placed some sort of whammy over Darcy.

“Can you tell if she goes willingly to him?” James asks, like he can read her mind.

 

“Her head is high until she leaves my vision,” Heimdall says as if that’s an answer. Darcy will hold her head up as she walks to a firing squad. They are stuck right where they started.   
“What is it that you want to do, Lady Jane?”

“Cripple Loki’s plans,” she says easily. It’s the best answer - stop Loki where he stands, “Cripple him.” If not more.

“If you aren’t comfortable lying to Darcy, Jane, no one will fault you. We can come up with another plan.”

Jane purses her lips together in a thin line, closes her eyes tight. Darcy should have always been her responsibility. She hired her, she supported her, she let Darcy take care of her. No, Jane can be comfortable lying to Darcy. She opens her eyes and nods to James and Heimdall, “It will be done.”

* * *

Darcy listens to Jane. It should be harder to lie to her, but as Jane tells Darcy a fools version of their plan, she does not hold back. Jane watches - it is what she was first trained to do as a curious girl, and then as a curious scientist. Jane watches Darcy, searching for something to convince her that her friend is not a liar and traitor to them. That Darcy is playing her own game, and not so far lost to a god that sings sweet violence in her ear.

Jane sees nothing in Darcy. Darcy just listens, asks a few questions and clarifies a few points. Darcy still offers her two cents on strategy, as if she has done nothing wrong.

“Darcy,” she says when she’s through with her experiment, with testing the variable and watching and waiting for results, “Are you okay?”

Finally, something passes over Darcy’s features. For a brief moment, she looks scared and uncertain. Nothing like the Darcy Jane knows. But it’s gone in a blink, “I’m perfectly fine, boss. You just let me know when it’s time to roll.”

Jane feels terrible when Darcy leaves, because she’s just looked betrayal in the face and betrayal smiled back at her. Darcy may be nervous but she made no overture of regret. Jane’s been locked up with trying to do whats right and managed to lose her best friend in the process. Jane takes a deep breath, someone needs to let Clint know that the next step of the plan can move forward. James and Clint will keep tabs on Darcy, track her movements, see where she goes and what she says.

But Jane is resolved, Darcy will come home with them. She just doesn’t know if the Darcy she takes back will be anything like the Darcy she came with.

* * *

It’s a struggle to find a place to camp out and wait for Darcy to pass him by on her way to see Loki. This whole damn thing is a mess, and worst of all, Clint understands. Loki is compelling even without a magic staff. He’s got centuries of practice emotionally manipulating to get what he wants. Once upon a time, he may have been merely a charming young man intent on pleasing others. But it doesn’t matter what happened to change him, he utilizes his charm and skill just as well as Thor with a blunt object.

He hears her foot steps, the rustle of the skirts she’s wearing, long before he sees her. Darcy has stopped being subtle about her comings and goings, brazen with heavy footfalls. When she passes him, he takes note of her glazed expression, the way her skin is tight around her cheekbones. She’s almost gaunt, almost gone, almost not Darcy anymore.

Clint has to believe she’s in there. He was in there. He has to believe, otherwise he’s probably going to have to kill her.

He waits the span of a few breaths before following her. Leaving just enough space between them so he can see her turn and twist through the opulent halls of the palace.

“Odin will not be a concern for you much longer,” he listens from just beyond the door, pulling out a little mirror, enchanted by Frigga, that allows him to see into the room, “Jane says that the energy transfer is near complete, even if she has no idea where it’s going.” She turns her head to the side, “Can gods really die?”

“We are not gods,” Loki answers, practically purring, touching her cheek and leading Darcy forward by the chin, “but the power we can wield is much the same. All things must die, Darcy. What else did your compatriot say?”

“Frigga’s transfer continues. They can’t figure out how to stop it. You are causing it somehow, right?” It’s the first sign that Darcy isn’t merely passively providing information. She’s investigating, but she gives it up after Loki narrows his eyes at her.

“That is none of your concern. please continue and we will discuss your reward.”

“They plan to consolidate what strength they still possess, and knowing that fighting is not your strength, attack you outright.” Darcy lifts her eyes to meet Loki’s, struggling through his control, “You need to show me something good if you want me to continue.”

At least her betrayal doesn’t come cheap, Clint muses. Darcy is immersed in a glittery and gory depiction of destruction. It’s a HYDRA base, one that Darcy has told Clint that she really wants to pull down and take apart inch by inch. It would cripple the organization. Darcy’s face turns sickly satisfied and Clint begins to understand how she was taken in by Loki. He’s giving her everything that her dark desires have wanted. It’s not just a dismantling of HYDRA or AIM, it’s a total annihilation meant to maximize suffering.

And it’s a total lie. There’s no substance to the image. Nothing that Loki shows her is actually happening, and he just wants to shake her until the wool comes out from her eyes. Eventually, she finishes telling Loki the details she’s been fed about timing, and he leaves her in the aftermath of the simulation. Darcy’s body vibrates, particles of light shaking around her, as she’s bathed in blood.

Clint has to duck out of the way to stay unseen by Loki but he waits for Darcy, full of terrible ideas. She doesn’t come out, so he steps into the room. The image around Darcy plays on an infinite loop, death after death after death. Clint has spent his adult life around death, and this is one of the most horrible things he has ever seen.

“Hey baby,” he says and clears his throat. This is the worst idea.

Darcy looks up, startled, and the image bursts around her. Her eyes widen and go wild, she struggles to hold onto the image but also scrambles out of it, “It’s not what it looks like, Clint. I was just…” she lifts her hands up, near her heart and drops them in futility, “I’m pulling one over on him, I am!”

Clint holds himself in, doesn’t let himself scoff and roll his eyes, instead he holds up the mirror from Frigga, “Do you know what this is?”

“Do you need to check your makeup?” Darcy says in a mocking deadpan.

“Frigga rigged it up for me, helps me see things remotely. But before I left, she pulled me aside and told me that it has another enchantment on it, that it lets me see the truth of things.” Clint looks at himself in the mirror. Sure enough, he sees the sorrow and anger that surrounds him, comes through him. Clint sees longing for his own universe and the pain of taking on the form of a dead man in this one. But love, he sees love and concern and determination, all playing on his face, “I know everything I see in this mirror, do you even know what you’ll see in it?”

She doesn’t take the bait, “I know what I’m doing,” she states as firm as mountains.

“By betraying us?”

“I’m getting things done, Clint. Missions I wouldn’t have dared to plan, because they would be suicide and wouldn’t accomplish anything. I don’t have to be satisfied with stealing data anymore, I can bring down HYDRA. I can bring them all down,” Darcy steadily raises her voice until she is almost yelling at Clint.

There’s not much left he can do, except turn the mirror so that she has to see herself.

Darcy turns pale, shakes and trembles, her face becomes small and so does she, trying to disappear into the air, “No, I’m not. I’m in…Clint, you have to understand….” Darcy pleads, and Clint’s heart breaks.

“It’s all been lies,” he says, “all of it, everything you saw comes out of your head. Loki is doing nothing for you, and you are his intelligence. “

“Clint please put it away,” Darcy folds in on herself and pleads with him, closing her eyes and refusing to look anymore, “Please.”

Clint does, and everything hurts within him to see Darcy fall down with her head between her knees. She alternates between racking and choked-off sobs. She had to see, she had to know what she was doing. He couldn’t let their work be here be finished without her knowing what she had done. He lays the mirror down in front of her, and kisses the top of her head. He still, needs to try to comfort her. But in the end, he has to leave her with her ghosts and hope that the woman he knows emerges.

* * *

She's soaked through the sleeves of her dress before Darcy can raise her head from her arms. She hasn't cried this much in years. All she wanted -- no, it was all she had bled for, killing herself in inches -- she thought she was getting it. Make a deal with a devil, sure, but Darcy thought she knew devils well enough to deceive them too.

Because of course, devils know each other. And she's just been another dupe.

She wants to smash the mirror to pieces. Then it can't tell her shit anymore, can't tell her everything she's done wrong. The Darcy in the mirror, as the layers of anger, rage, and wrong faded to the truth, was nothing more than her at the moment she learned of Coulson's death. She's never moved from that second. Darcy's just really good at acting like she has.

She achingly pulls herself back up and looks at the room around her. It’s dark, but she looks over the pool where she spent so much time, watching battles play out, getting her feet wet. It’s just water. It’s just a well. She doesn’t see her true self, she doesn’t see herself as she desires.

It’s just a well covered in Loki’s illusions and manipulations.

She looks again at Frigga’s mirror. Like that first time she looked over the edge of the well, she seems lifeless, her eyes closed. But her mirror-self opens her eyes and smiles with satisfaction of a well-formed plan. Jane’s always told her that when she’s set on controlling the world a great calm comes over Darcy. That’s what Darcy sees now. The great calm engulfing her.

Her feet take her to Frigga before she knows it, and she demands to be seen. Frigga’s handmaids open the doors to let her in and Darcy holds out the mirror to the Queen.

“I think I see who Loki learned to manipulate from,” Darcy says bitterly. Frigga does not take the mirror from her, so Darcy sets in down in front of her.

“Manipulation is the soul of magic. It’s about knowing people, knowing how our choices change the world around us. Loki learned that early, but I failed in teaching him generosity and kindness when your world turns on a wheel.” Frigga answers, rising from her chair and dismissing the maidens. “Other people will say that magic is inflicting and forcing your will upon the universe. But the universe is vast and we are not -- what use does the universe have for a speck. Why would it take notice? We must manipulate what we can see and feel. We trick and we play. So yes, Loki learned this from me. I am his mother, who better to learn from?”

“If only he hadn’t listened,” Darcy can’t look Frigga in the eye, cannot raise her chin and ends up looking past the Queen.

“If only you hadn’t, you mean.” Frigga steps in front of her, tilts Darcy’s chin up and forces their eyes to meet, “Did you come here for motherly platitudes? For me to tell you that we forgive you for your transgressions? You will not find that here. You wish forgiveness, but you do not want it from me, and I will not grant it in their stead.”

“I want to know what I can do,” Darcy digs her heels in, and does not think of how she will have to grovel and beg. But perhaps she can earn a little ground back, “I want….”

“You still only think of yourself and your desires. Perhaps you should start there.”

The air in the room is chilly and Darcy knows she is not very welcome here. Frigga has a point though, she needs to stop thinking of herself and the way she can redeem herself, and just do the work instead. She glances about, searching her mind for a course of action, before bowing her head. She thanks Frigga, who dismisses her with more kindness than Darcy deserves.

If magic is nothing but manipulation, then she can use it like a professional. Searching out Loki isn’t terribly difficult if she empties her mind and lets the shadow of his will fill in, and shortly she finds herself alone with him.

“Back so soon, Lady Darcy?” Loki’s lips twist in cruel mirth, “I cannot show you another of your targets so soon and in this room. Did you find something new to tell me?”

“No, that was not what….” She schools her features into doubt, “I am unsure of the effectiveness of what you are doing for me.”

“You have seen the results, have you not? The battles that have been won for you?”

“Oh yes, I have,” Darcy has stood in their mists, her feet covered in the imagined blood. She looks down at her feet a little ill at how good that made her feel, “but it’s hard, being here on Asgard, to know what they are doing back home, or what I can bring back to show that I have made the choices that lead to their defeat. I have nothing concrete, no weapons, nothing in my hands.”

Just as his mother before, he comes to her and lifts her chin to have her meet his gaze, but it is not the same. Frigga’s was filled with disappointment, cold but with the strength of a mother. Loki holds her chin lightly, and his fingers slide on her skin like a snake. “You wish for a weapon to use in your realm?”

“I believe I have served you well at great expense.” She finds it easy to avert her eyes and feed into Loki’s powers, “I don’t know who I am going to have left when I go home. I might as well have something that I can use to cut through the hardest material.” Darcy leans into his touch, and lifts her eyes through her lashes, and does her damnedest to look even more broken than she is.

“Sweet Lady Darcy, I understand.” A split second passes before he lets her go, and he wipes his hand on his clothes, “You have done well for me, and that should be rewarded. Please, wait here.”

Loki isn’t gone long, but waiting makes Darcy start to second guess her plan, which is based on Loki behaving exactly as she expects he will. Does she know him well enough? Does he favor her at all or just her intelligence? 

When he returns, he holds an intricately decorated long axe out to her. “A weapon that can cut through even diamonds, and harder materials beyond your human knowledge. Yours, to remember your service to Asgard.”

Darcy takes the axe into her hands, running her finger against the flat of the blade. The head is pitch black with inlaid gold knots that shine light. It is a beautiful weapon and Darcy intends to use it well. She lifts it up, grasping the haft in both hands and thinks for just a moment that this would be the moment to turn her back on her plan and just slice through the scheming prince. But that would only again serve herself, cover herself in impulse and blood.

“Thank you,” she says, letting awe color her voice, “I will use it well.”

“See that you do.” Loki replies, “When you have more to tell me, please report as quick as you can.” A dismissal, but not an unkind one.

Darcy flies through the halls, barely registering her own footsteps, and only slowing as she encounters guards and servants. And then she’s there, in Heimdal’s great hall, and her nerves stop her at the threshold. It’s no matter though, Heimdal is all-seeing in his domain.

“Have you come to end my misery?” Heimdal asks from his encasement.

Darcy crosses the threshold. “You ever get a line of poetry or song stuck in your head? Even when it’s wrong out of context? For me it’s ‘I must far and near bear the anger of my beloved’. I don’t even know the rest of the poem other than it’s in old english and there’re people that believe it doesn’t even have a woman as the subject, because it’s better allegory if it’s a guy,” Darcy shakes her head, settling her thoughts -- this isn’t the time for a history lesson to the man who has seen all of history unfold, “I’ve been bearing enough anger for an army. Yes, I have come to end your misery.”

“It will not end yours,” He replies, impassive and still.

“I know, but yours is enough,” she circles around to face the man, and the gold that traps him, “You know, it’s funny, gold is a pretty soft material, you’d think someone would have tried this before,” she lowers and taps the axe where the floor and the gold meet, and when she lifts the axe again, there’s a scratch. “But perhaps the right weapon was needed.”

Heimdal closes his eyes, and tightens the grip on his sword. Darcy swings the axe high to gain momentum and strength. The axe doesn’t go easily through the enchanted metal, but every swing is another inch towards freedom for the man who watches. Her muscles ache in joy when she’s through, when Heimdal takes his first steps out of his prison.

She waits for him to stumble, but it seems Asgardian muscles don’t atrophy from disuse like humans.

“We should go to Frigga and to the Lady Jane, so that we may begin.” Heimdal smiles, lifting his foot and stretching it in a circle, “But let us walk briskly.”

* * *

“Bring everyone in,” Jane says to Bucky, “It’s time.” But the look on her face says its not time to fight, so it must be the other thing. Bucky holds his breath and closes his eyes.

“Do we find Darc—“

“No.” Jane interrupts, “No we don’t.” She looks up at Bucky, stepping closer to him, a stubborn set to her features, “she doesn’t need to be there for this part. I’m not sure she’s capable of proper emotion at this point, and we can’t let her run off to Loki.” Jane holds herself tight and controlled, almost vibrating with pent up anger.

Part of it, Bucky reasons, is that Jane is gearing up for a fight. A fight that Jane isn’t necessarily ready for. Bucky has spent his life amongst brave men, strong men — the best and worst of them, and he’s not sure anyone can match an Asgardian. Jane has a shot though. The hammer finds her worthy. Bucky finds her worthy. Steve probably would have liked her too, probably would have liked another person who found themselves encumbered with more strength than they know what to do with.

They walk together, shoulder to shoulder, to the chamber where Odin lays, meeting Frigga. Clint’s already there as well, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, knees bent and his feet on the floor. An Asgardian bow and a quiver full of arrows lays next to him. He’s getting a soldiers rest, not worth calling a nap, but a moment of rest caught when he can and stored for later use.

“Are we ready?” Jane asks Frigga, bowing her head in respect.

They mean to bring Odin to death’s door, and weave magic tight enough that the truth of his living is hidden even from Loki. Loki is an expert, but Frigga is a master. The difference between them is how they choose to use their talent and skill.

“We are,” Frigga replies and bows her head to return the respect. Frigga wears widow’s weeds, and while Odin’s death is a ruse, her choice of clothing is not.

Jane understands the mechanics and Frigga the intricate enchantments, but Bucky has no idea what is going on. Clint gradually pulls himself up and comes to stand beside Bucky. They watch together in silence, the air thick and heavy, souring with the stench of the recently departed. It’s a good illusion; it turns his stomach.

“You think this is a good plan?” Clint asks, biting his lips.

“Did your girlfriend do what she was supposed to do?” Bucky replies with too much bite and Clint takes it like a punch to the face and flinches.

“Like a chump. I uh, kinda did a stupid thing.”

Bucky is going to spend his life cleaning up after other people’s foolishness, “What?” he hisses and narrows his eyes, “What did you tell her?”

“Showed her herself and left her alone. Now we’ve got this loose thread that we can’t account for, because Darcy’s unpredictable. I don’t know if she’ll double down, wither or….” He trails off and looks at Bucky, “But I couldn’t do this without giving her a chance.”

Because he loves her, and there’s the kick of the whole damn thing. Clint’s willing to throw out a whole mess of planning because he needs to give his girl one last chance. It’s too late now, every things in motion. A few minutes more and they’ll be ringing out the bell that marks the death of a king.

Loki will come and there will be death at last.

The bell rings slow and deep, and reverberates throughout the entire palace. Bucky can feel it in the floor through his boots. Guards rush in, carefully selected by Frigga, and they form a semicircle around the bier. Jane gestures to Bucky, and he takes piece of equipment she had been using from her hands to hide away. Bucky and Clint take their positions behind Jane and Frigga.

When Loki enters, it must be an impressive sight. Somber but in no way diminished, Frigga’s hands cradle Odin’s head and she looks up at her son. The sorrow isn’t acting, there is plenty for her to mourn, she must have an infinite well to draw from. “It is done, my son,” she announces, caught between the personal and the political.

Loki, for all the horror that curls in his heart, loves Frigga. He may be willing to throw her over for his own gain, but he crosses the room in great strides to embrace her.

Bucky watches Jane, standing on the other side of the bier, instead of watching what will likely be the last living closeness between mother and son. Jane’s lowered her gaze, it’s uncomfortable to watch, because it’s so clear that Jane is struggling to not identify with the charged emotion that fills and fractures the hall like the moment before lightning strikes.  
When they break from each other, Loki doesn’t remove his hands from Frigga’s arms, “I will take care of everything, mother.”

“I’m sure you will,” Darcy stands in the doorway. She’s dressed not in the serviceable clothing that they’ve all been given, but brilliant Asgardian armor. Chainmail as fine as mesh, a breastplate with a stylized rabbit being chased by a predator. She holds a helm underneath her arm and a nasty looking axe in the other, “The same way you took care of me, Loki Liesmith? Will you create a dream for your Queen? Or entomb her as you did Heimdal?”

“Darcy —“ Jane hisses, but Darcy is already slipping on her helm and charging towards Loki.  
Loki easily knocks her back with a wave of his arm, and Darcy flies backwards, crashing metal against the floor when she lands in a painful looking roll through the line of guards and into Bucky.

“Fuck!” he says with Loki’s full attention on him.

Loki fills with suspicion and rips the veil of enchantment. Bucky can feel the magic being torn from the room, showing Odin not just alive, but improving. “You try to deceive me? You think you can outwit me? I was born to rule this land and I will continue to do so. Asgard with triumph under my hand! I shall conquer and quiet all the Nine Realms, just as Odin wished to do.”

From what Clint has said, Loki is a melodramatic speechmaker in any universe. Loki spreads his arms wide to encompass them all, “I would just send you all home, let you flail and fail before I come to take what will be mine. If that child is any indication, Midgard will crumble to dust.”

“I’ve heard all this before,” Clint says, “You’ll be surprised what we mere mortals can accomplish.”

Loki duplicates himself to stand before each of them, as he takes Frigga in hand again, catching her off-guard in a harsh grip. His voice echoes out of each of their mouths, “I will accomplish more.”

“I would rather pull apart the bridge piece by piece than allow you to cross it one more time,” Heimdal walks free and clear into the room, and Loki’s illusions snap back to their master. He is not by any means at full strength and he wavers on legs that seem too thin to support his weight.

Jane calls Mjolnir to her and the lightning that’s been threatening to crash does. The air around Jane appears to explode into small plates and forms her armor. She screams from the bottom of her lungs, powering through her throat. Loki pulls his hands apart and the guards fall down, their armor crinkling like tin cans, their bodies crumbling and cracking. Clint swears and Darcy struggles to get back upright. She fails, her legs unable to support her weight after being thrown into the line of guards. When she can’t walk, Darcy starts to crawl and drag herself out of the way.

Loki takes a sword from one of the fallen guards and meets Jane head on. There’s no use standing around like an idiot, gaping at Jane’s talent with the hammer. Clint helps Frigga move out of the way, towards Darcy, and Bucky goes over to them.

“Okay, so we need a new plan,” Bucky says, watching as Heimdal moves in to fight as well. But Loki, hopped up on stolen energy, is faster, stronger, more powerful than both of them together. “How do we weaken him so that it doesn’t take all of the nine realms to take him down?”

“He’s only going to get stronger,” Darcy says, “With the transfer from Frigga still going.”

“It’s not,” Clint tells her, “That’s what we wanted Loki to know.”

Darcy blinks several times, processing, “Was your plan always to overpower him?” Clint doesn’t respond to her, “Was it?” Nobody responds. Even if she has brought Heimdal with her, there’s no telling what hold Loki has over Darcy. “He thinks he has an unlimited source of energy in Frigga, without that….”

“He’ll be overconfident.” Bucky thinks out loud, “And he’s going to weaken unexpectedly. So we keep him at this level until he crashes, and then…then he’s done.” Bucky looks over at the fight, at Jane twisting and turning out of Loki’s way. Jane’s mastery comes in agility, not pure muscle, and her endurance is good but it’s not infinite.

“Let’s not movie ninja this shit,” Clint says, “Take a break when you need too, but he is outnumbered, let’s use our advantage. No drawing him out, keep him moving. Lady Frigga, will you be —“

“I am more prepared in regards to my own defense than most would believe,” Frigga responds flatly. 

Bucky believes it, Frigga has the focus and drive to be more than a threat even without magic.  
Clint scrambles for a position that allows him the ability to distract Loki with close shots. They aren’t misses, but Loki’s clothing acts as armor, and arrows bounce off. Bucky dives in with a knife. The three of them, Bucky, Jane and Heimdal, united against Loki begins to turn the tide.   
Loki sneers, “You ignorant fools, what use is this fight? You will not win, you will only suffer.   
And for what? When I come to Midgard, you will be happy to be ruled. I am not cruel, I will not inflict more war, more pain than what your humanity already does to itself.”

“We are not children waiting for a kind, considerate teacher-overlord,” Jane bites out between grunts, “We don’t submit that easily.” Mjolnir makes hits against Loki’s chest, leaving him reeling and confused for a moment.

Loki narrows his eyes, and Bucky assumes he’s starting to feel winded. It’s an opening, a small one, and there’s not enough time to take it before Loki duplicates himself again. He stands before each of them, “But you will submit. You will turn and crawl towards power beyond your comprehension. Just like your sweet and dear friend did.” The duplicate in front of Darcy turns shimmers into solidity and flips her over, grinding his boot into her chest. Darcy screams, grabs his foot and tries to move, but she barely shakes his leg, “That’s what happens in the end, of course, people turn their faces to power and go to it willingly.”

The Real Loki doesn’t see the arrow coming and misses his attempt to catch it mid-air. It goes through, and the extra Lokis abruptly disappear as he growls in disbelief at Clint. It gives time for Darcy to curl up and for Frigga to kneel beside her. They talk softly and eventually Darcy nods.

Jane and Heimdal press in again, Bucky coming up behind Loki. Bucky can see the sweat on the back of his neck. He’s the only one with any real chance of bringing Loki down. He kicks out Loki’s feet as he’s distracted by Heimdal’s sword and flips Loki with all the strength he has. 

“Jane, Jane, now!” He yells.

Jane doesn’t need more explanation, she drops the hammer on Loki, “Are you quite done now?”

Loki squirms, “You can’t leave it there forever. You will want to leave someday, you will want to take your weapon with you.”

“Jane Foster will leave. She will remain worthy of Mjolnir for years yet, but Loki, son of my heart even if not of my body, you will not move,” Frigga’s magic envelops them all, a warm feeling, before it narrows to just Loki, “Remove your weapon my dear and look away.” Frigga looks at them all, her face resolute and weary, “Look away! All of you!”

Jane takes the hammer and lifts it away and Loki screams as he is encased in the narrow beam of a magical field. No, not true magic, Bucky can’t see this, this is a technology that he is terrified of, and he has to look away. It’s a stasis field and it burrows into Loki. His fine aristocratic features lock in horror and all sound from him stops.

“How did you….” Jane breaks off when she hears a crash. It’s Darcy, falling back to the floor. She’d been bent over some apparatus.

“I’m okay,” Darcy says, breathing loudly and in half a sob she asks, “Did I do it right?”

“You did it well enough, my dear.” Frigga comes beside her son and kneels. She pulls at the stasis field with her fingers until a thin beaded line emerges and snakes its way to Odin’s bier, 

“At least his death will bring back one of the lives he has taken.” Frigga stands up, rustles her skirts around her and wipes her face. She pulls herself inwards until her face and her body regain a regal and cold composure, “I will send our healers to your rooms and give you hospitality until you are well enough to travel, but we will mourn in private.”

Heimdal comes to her arm, and they walk out together, and the only sound is their shoes against the floor. Even Clint keeps his mouth shut until the pair is well out of distance. Bucky looks around, the fallen guards are still, blood seeping through their armor. Jane looks confused, her mouth open.

Clint jumps down from the spot he had climbed to, and looks between Darcy and Jane and then to Bucky. Bucky nods in Darcy’s direction.

“Let’s go get looked at,” Bucky says.

“Can you give me some help with Darcy?” Clint says, rolling up her clothes to look at her legs, 

“Nothings broken, I think.” He touches her swelling legs carefully and she starts telling him, telling them all, that she’s sorry, she thought, she thought she could handle Loki, she’s sorry. 

“Please don’t,” Clint says, “Because I’m going to want to tell you it’s okay and it’s not.”

“Let’s go,” Jane says, “I want to go home.”

* * *

EPILOGUE

* * *

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope it is a long time before we see each other again,” Bucky says to Heimdal, and Jane can’t help but feel the same way. They’ve taken their turns with handshakes and embraces with the man who watches. His strength is returning, Asgardians heal quickly even from atrophy, she supposes.

Darcy asks Heimdal to keep an eye on her. Heimdal nods, and hands her the axe she used to free him. “You wrest it from Loki with great care, you should keep it and use it well in your own battles.”

Darcy takes the axe, her lips pressed against each other, “Thank you, though I think it will be a long time before I fight again.”

Jane doesn’t know what to do about Darcy. She’s so fragile right now, it’s almost not worth being upset at her. Darcy had worked against them, but how much of that was her own desire and how much was Loki’s will? Jane isn’t sure, and no one else is either. It’s a problem to be sorted out back on Earth. There has to be someone out there that has the capacity to help her.

Frigga wears her mourning blacks, as do all of her handmaidens when they enter Heimdal’s hall. They have not seen her in the three days it took for Darcy to heal enough to walk unaided, even with Asgardian medicine. She comes to Jane, stands before her without expression. Jane feels herself being looked over and is surprised with the force of Frigga’s embrace. “I do not know how to thank you all properly. Odin will recover in some time, a hundred years or more, but eventually. Asgard will thrive again. Thanks to you. Even if you did not carry my son’s mantle, you would be welcome here.”

“Thank you, my Lady,” Jane says with a dip to her knees, “If I ever get a chance to come back and study, I will. There is so much here that I want to explore and know about.” Before her scientific curiosity can run away with her she adds, “And I am sorry for your loss. Loki was still your son, for all the harm he has brought.”

“A mother raises her children,” Frigga says wearily, “Take care of your team.” She inclines her head to Jane, and then to the rest of the Midgardians, “Send them home, Heimdal.”

Heimdal does. The road opens before them and they walk through together. The bridge spits them out at the landing pad at the Tower.

“JARVIS? Where is everyone?” Clint asks, helping Darcy stay upright as she stumbles.

“Ms Potts, Ms Romanov, and Mr Rhodes are currently in the common lounge,” JARVIS responds. Jane didn’t know it would sound so good to hear a computer’s voice, but it is. It’s home.

“Have we got a story to tell you —“ Bucky starts, as he opens the door and they walk in  
“What the hell happened,” Natasha says, “Where have you been?”

Pepper is in the protective layer she wears under the suit, so is Rhodey. Natasha’s hair is all out of sorts, and there’s ashes on her cheeks.

“Hey, when did we get a blonde?” Clint asks, “And a kid?” Jane looks out over the room, and sure enough. On the couch is a blonde woman, her hair sheared at one side, and not on purpose. Next to her is another woman, a brunette holding an icepack to her eye. And in the chair across from them is a skinny white boy, no more than sixteen, in a red and blue hoodie.

Natasha huffs, “You were gone for almost three weeks. Meet Carol, Jess and …well, maybe he’ll give us a name eventually, but he calls himself Spider-Man.”

“Because the kid is so original.” Rhodey adds.

“We’ve got a lot to tell you too.” Pepper finishes, and pulls out a bottle of wine. From the looks of it, it’s going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This great, glorious piece of work is done. Thank you to fireun, my steadfast beta. She's amazing. Thank you to everyone that read through bits and pieces as I wrote and kept me motivated, especially while I decided to do nothing but write this chapter for weeks on end.
> 
> There will be a part 3 of the B-team sometime next year focusing on just what Rhodey, Pepper and Natasha were getting up to while the rest were in Asgard.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and if you've read this far, you should know you can always fine me at [ my tumblr](http://twistedingenue.tumblr.com)


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